Active public space studio - Tutors: Edouard Cabay, Rodrigo Aguirre.
Sants station is one of mayors nodes of transport in Barcelona, and the esplanade right in front of it is a place that has no attractive, and life does not happen in this place. The challenge of this studio was to activate this public space, following an unconventional design process.
Part of this process was to be inspired by the automatic drawing, by designing and building a drawing machine that captures the movement into a beautiful drawing. Tha machine uses an Arduino board combined with ultrasonic sensors, to sense the obstacles.
This drawing was obtained with the drawing machine. Pen on white paper
This drawing represent the logic behind the movement of the machine: straight lines represent the direction, matematically defined as derivate, of the trajectory in one of its point.
The will of this mapping tecnique was to understand and map public space usage and perceptions in an analytic and measurable way, throught noise, garbage, people behaviour.
Mapping colors according to their physical qualities like saturation, brightness and hue, can give a precise description of spatial qualities and underline particular uses of the space.
This two fields of investigation merged together in the proposal for an interactive public space, populates with columns that create different environments by variating thier density and functions, miming the complexity of a forest.
Columns light up in different colours according to the intensity of the activity that are happening around them. This dramatic solution brings the control of space to users.
In the physical model, columns color were created by RGB LED controlled by an arduino board, lighting up acrilyc sticks.
A drawing machine has been integrated in the square, in order to track peoples movement.