If myths surrounding a place influence our behavior towards it, do we have the power to change those myths through our behavior? Myths thrive on people's reactions. Driving a change in how we react to a certain place surrounded by myths needs to involve the people themselves. This project explores a participatory approach in a post-built situation to test the ability of architecture to change myths. If people build stories of myths, then they have the power to change those stories.

Talks about the built environment influencing climate change is usually met with ambitious experiments in terms of materials, simulations and design and construction processes. In all these uproar, we often lose sight of what's in front of us: we could start by changing our immediate environment. We could start small. Could material experiments that involve changing the microclimate of an urban area lead to eventual exponential change in the built environment?

Pop-up urbanism is talk-of-the town now. You could call this the brainchild of Bonnie Sherk with her experiments in the streets of San Francisco in the 1970s, or you could say it comes from ancient traditions of portable shops and carts. But every idea adapts with the times they are implemented in. Yatai (food carts in Japan) were all the rage during the Meiji Era, but lost its significance post the 1964 Olympics. This project tries to revive an old urbanism strategy in a new light.

How does the urban built fabric sustain a high rate of migration: seasonal and constant? While solutions have been explored in mass affordable housing, they have failed in this context: a situation evident in the formation of informal settlements. These settlements, on the other hand, have managed to showcase high levels of ingenuity and innovation in the creation of spaces attuned to individual needs of dwellers. What can mass housing design learn from them?

Emerging technologies, new local information and processes in architecture, informal settlements: these were the strings connected in this workshop hosted by the Norman Foster Foundation. Discussions about innovation that happens at a hyperlocal scale in informal settlements and how they impact the macroeconomics of the global south took centre stage. It leads one to consider strategies of bringing this innovation to the forefront of the global dialogue in sustainability?

Self-construction in informal settlements is considered to be one of the most affordable ways of housing production. It provides a high level of autonomy to the dweller in the housing process. The sole limitation is the quality of the built output. While most would claim this is due to a lack of skills, this project attributes this disparity to an information and communication gap in the construction process. Nothing that a digital communication system couldn't solve.

Imagine losing your sense of touch: you wash your face with burning water without realizing the water is boiling, or you cut your hand on a sharp object because you didn't realize it was sharp. An overreliance on other senses makes us forget that touch is the most important sense of all. This project explores a heightened sense of touch, but cutting off visual and auditory aid. Experiments using temperature and shape are used to build a paper lantern.

As Digital Fabricators concerned with the development cost of both the hardware and the software required to create complex 3D Geometries, we wanted to know: is there another way? Not to say that complexity equals merit, we are more interested in making highly customizable tools more accessible. So we asked ourselves: could we “data-mine” existing practices of systematized movement, and repurpose them for digital fabrication? Instead of a robot arm, what about a Tango dancer?