Space for Potential - 2015/16

Spatial and object design concept for cloud-based creative platform 'Co.Lab'

Co.lab

Design Intent: Exploring productivity and temporality on spatial, product and human scales, with consideration for technological and human occupancy in changing contexts.

Essentially designing for the future of 'Co.Lab' - an app designed to network freelancers, clients and to utilise unused urban spaces as their collaborative workspaces. These spaces are inhabited by temporary architectural spaces which accommodate collaboration that "Space for Potential" creates.

The future of productivity is technology; designing an interior space which treats technology as an inhabitant alongside humans, productivity is maximised within a collaborative workspace. This proposal is that of a flat-pack system of modular rods, mountable and demountable to specific requirements per user. The personalisation of the product subject to user and context is a rhetoric of the designers using these shared spaces. Designing for the future phases out the common idea of an office - a desk, a chair, four walls. "Space for Potential" lets the user define the space using object in relation to task, as opposed to the space confining the designer and the task.

The Space for Potential Catalogue is available on the app to facilitate freelancers and creatives to their specifications. Included are explained design process, build instructions and examples of functional options for the personalised furniture, formulated in consideration of temporal site locations, task and designer.

Above left/center: Space for Potential modular possibilities and scales.

Above right: Volumetric study demonstrating the use of temporary suspended partitions within a cube, Space for Potential modular furniture and design-collaborators' inhabitation.