MAVERICKS propose a student housing project that embraces the technological potential of The Internet of Things in order to self-organise social and programmatic complexity on demand. Using social media, students are able to directly customise their own space, contribute to communal space, and collectively vote on the temporary emergence of building-scale social spaces for use by the larger collective. As human interactions are constantly in flux, our built environment should be able to adapt, promote and participate in this constant exchange of information. Therefore, the building is conceived of as a networked organisation of tectonic parts that embody relational computational rule sets in relation to user's desires, acting as an interface for communication. Custom algorithms were written based on gradient cellular automata in order to allow local differentiable decisions that propagate related changes throughout larger regions of the building. The design has been developed in order to generate emergent affects over time through the daily behavioural cycles of its inhabitant’s choices both individually and collectively. The thesis extends Gordon Pask's ideas on cybernetics into the world
of online social media technology and the need for student housing by recasting the role of people within buildings. Consideration is given to different sets of communication: people-to-people; people-to-building; and building parts-to-other building parts resulting in a system of collective living that introduces a continually adaptive life-cycle that is based on the patterns of inhabitants and the constituent components of the environment itself.

Project Name:
Collective Living

Studio:
Robert Stuart-Smith

Team Name:
Mavericks

Team members:
Mar’ya Filatova (Ukraine), Sofoklis Goulielmos Koutsourelis (Greece), Sakshi Mathur (India), Alexandros-Paris Tsernos (Greece)

Assistant:
Tyson Hosmer