Piero Vidoni
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Living the future
With this thesis I have tried to understand the changes that my life has undergone in the last twenty years. In particular, I focused on the advent of the Internet and how this powerful medium has changed our habits of life, the ways in which we interact with each other and the relationship we establish with physical spaces.
Being a generic Internet user myself, I centered my thesis on my own life. I experienced the internet deprivation for a week in a digital detox to understand how this medium is distorting the phenomenal world. In addition, I tried for a week a reality detox in order to understand which are the elements that make the web so unique.
These experiences allowed me to highlight the essence of this new platform, emphasizing aspects and themes that I then translated in collages and integrated into the final proposal.
The parallel research on the state and prospects of new technologies directed the thesis to the concept of the metaverse, a digital spatial dimension.
After experimenting with existing metaverse on some platforms, I felt the need to completely rethink how a possible digital life could sit alongside our real lives. Hence, the idea of a Tabula Scripta approach, a new way of meaning the use of digital spaces together with the cultural and symbolic value already intrinsic in our cities.
The Internet is an architecture based on the contribution of billions of users and, replicating this method, I decided to explore what my contribution can be in this new environment. I took into consideration my home and began a process of overwriting, a dialogue between the existing and the digital world. I analyzed the spatial characteristics of the environment and tried to incorporate what the physical inputs of our bodies can add to the digital experience.
The final design consists of a digital environment in which the end-user can fully experience the Internet, using the space to navigate, search, connect, and wonder. Most spaces are based on the dimensions and characteristics of the space in which I live. This ensures a constant dialogue between the two dimensions and keeps their connection stable. The different floors of the building offer a glimpse into new ways of using space in combination with digital functions.
Those principles were extended to a portion of the city center of Amsterdam. Here, a new metaverse is tested. The result is a landscape of uniqueness where all the citizen/user are adding spaces that reflects their own passion and interest. In this bottom-up process of spontaneous generation of architecture, communities are formed.
In addition to the project, thanks to the discoveries made during this research, I wrote a small manual on how to do design in the digital environment.
Afstudeerdatum: 22 Augustus 2022
Afstudeercommissie: Hein van Lieshout (mentor), Lada Hrsak, Stijn de Weerd
Toegevoegde leden t.b.v. het examen: Jan Richard Kikkert, Txell Blanco Diaz