Public Thresholds: Activating Existing Public Interiors through Spatial Experimentation

Activating Existing Public Interiors through Spatial Experimentation

Abstract

Activating public life in space has been a concern in architecture and urban design, particularly within the liquid conditions of late modernity, where the separation between public and private are continously blurred. While theoretical discourse has shifted towards relational and dynamic understandings of publicness, design practice struggles to intentionally activate public life, especially within existing public interiors, revealing a gap between theoretical and spatial practice. This dissertation addresses this gap by exploring how design approaches can activate publicness in existing public interiors, adopting design-driven research (DDR) as a methodological framework, positioning design as an independent mode of enquiry. Through a series of situated spatial experiments, the research investigates how publicness can be activated in specific contexts to extract knowledge through iterative cycles of design, implementation, observation, and critical reflexivity.

Cross-comparing and overlaying the design experiments, the findings conceptualise publicness as a dynamic threshold condition that emerges from the relations in an ecology of people, objects, nature, space, and institutions, that can be shaped through processes of spatial transformation. A key mechanism to articulate publicness in processes of spatial transformation proved to be collective creation: a tool for forming publics around shared matters of care through collective problematisation. Finally, the research contributed to desgin research by showing the capacity of design-driven spatial experimentation to produce situated and transferable knowledge. It also contributes to public space theory and design by reframing publicness as a relational process shaped by relational, embedded and emobdied design approaches allowing designers to intentionally engage and activate it within existing public interiors.