Weiyin Ma

The spatial design of a home has an affinity to intimacy that might have been overlooked by many practicing architects. In this paper, the subject matter of housing will be discussed with a shifted focus from domestic buildings to the space of home and intimacy that scatters in a city. In recent years, some sociologists (Illouz, 2013 & 1997; Turkle, 2013; Jamieson, 2012) have underlined a social translation of a new spatial home by analysing an intimacy in a city that has been enabled by ICT technologies; business models i.e. Airbnb and Couchsurfing also indicated a new form of dwelling by demonstrating how share-economy can assist this spatial home and, in particular, assist the distribution of it so as to assist a city dweller to find and make home without possessing a house. And yet, neither of these examples of home are designed by architects who might actually know the best about the subject matter - this space of home and intimacy. What if the critical spatial design that an architect can produce isn’t the domestic buildings but the visualisation of this space? What is this critical spatial design of the home to cope with the shifting social needs already seen? Through Jeremy Till’s way of looking at buildings and beyond - the lens of Spatial Agency (2011) - the paper will further speculate these examples of home by architectural-writing this spatial design - this architectural-writing, as Jane Rendell describes in chapter of Essay Collections of Critical Architecture (2007), similarly to art-writing, “the very form of the writing itself is taken to be integral to the way in which a critic positions him/herself… The personal and autobiographical enter the debate, not in order to assert an ego criticism, but as part of an on-going political exploration of subjectivity.”

“A home is not a house” can be read as a design hypothesis for an alternative urban domesticity and an attempt to explore a more distributed mode of existence than what a fixed house might have presumably confined for its users. In this design hypothesis, the sedentary narrative for the design of a fixed house was questioned, mostly on its physical forms and as well, on its social implications. As a design research, Pop-up Home further explores this design hypothesis in a refreshed context of a distributed home and on a focused subject of domestic intimacy. For Pop-up Home, domestic intimacy can be defined as a spatial “sense of home” which can be found extending beyond a sedentary home.

Pop-up Home takes on a combination of an auto-ethnographic and a participatory action research. Through the perspective of an auto-ethnographic urban nomad, the design research collects a set of “lived-experience” ranging from being a compact home renter, to a “rug sojourner”, then to a “rickshaw-bed rider”, and to a “digital nomad” with a lifestyle of “living as service” via distributed accommodation platforms such as Airbnb and Couchsurfing, etc. Through this perspective of the urban nomad, the MPhil thesis explores spatial evidence for alternative forms of urban domesticity which are not based upon a fixed house, but rather which take a more distributed form. Through the same perspective, the thesis also explores an alternative design narrative of urban domesticity in which a new social form of domestic life in a more distributed mode is emerging. The collected examples of urban nomads and their distributed domestic intimacy have been captured through the auto-ethnographic work and experiential encounters in Hong Kong, Pune India, and London.

Documenting and curating the above set of examples, and based on the theoretical framework of “spatial agency”, the design research constructs both an empathetic and an intellectual framework for understanding the evidenced changes in urban domesticity, in relation to the increasingly precarious conditions of life in modern economies. The MPhil thesis, as a phase of the design research overall, aims to focus on the conflicts between the institution of the sedentary home and the nomadic nature of a “creative user”; and to evoke a positive ideology where a fixed house could be planned, transformed, maintained, and/or altered creatively by these users. This framework for a distributed home might lead to a specific method of “participatory design” to think, practice, and finance future urban domesticity in a “small, local, open and connected” design scenario of a world city, and contribute to a more genuine human-centred design method and design thinking for future urban domesticity.