Polynesia

Our project is a speculation on the design process itself, re-imagining the established relationship between designers, users and the final result. It is an interactive experience that works a mediator establishing a more dynamic relationship. The user comes across unexpected and uncanny events in the most iconic and ordinary building types in Greece

Our aim is to employ a new tactical mode of operation, a form of action that lies within the gaps and slips of conventional thinking. We set to invent a new ambiguous representation that seeks to reveal users’ “real” identity and thus function as a personalized avatar. In order to elicit data for the creation of such a representation users are subjected to a series of unsettling events following a day’s itinerary. It is formal act where mocking traditional thinking and subverting existing conventions is incorporated into a new design process. The videogame functions as a mediator between the known, identified and inscribed with meaningful actions space, and a potential one. Its main purpose is to exploit the potency of the unfamiliar and explore new provocative ideas by constantly undermining the very notion of “the normal state”. In our virtual world the player comes across an overlay of bizarre aesthetics, textual information and contradicting phenomena, utilizing unfamiliarity to pose a “what if” question. Furthermore it involves an act of cognitive mapping. An act where player’s perception and knowledge are mapped though his choices. While players navigate through space and time they produce a certain trajectory, functioning as agents within a complex system. In that sense the trajectory serves as a qualitative and quantitative analysis of how players relate to places or other inhabitants and also how much they deviate from normality. The whole process redraws boundary lines and assigns new properties to each side. In a way Architecture itself is a formal practice is of inscribing boundaries. The concept of islandness became the tool to create a new topology of the building and also the cognitive device to map multiple conditions. The most enchanting property of islands is the fact that they are familiar yet really fuzzy entities. We think of islands as sites of innovative conceptualization, a device that can be stretched to describe almost any physical or imaginary form. Our map is an island, and a map always predicates an action, in that case an act of design.