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This 3-weekends free and open-to-all workshop will take place in July 2022, participants’ output will be exhibited at Hong Kong Biennale of Urbanism \ Architecture (UABB 2022). Taught by an international and interdisciplinary team of architects, artists, animators, and programmers, participants will work with local communities in Hong Kong to develop visions of sustainable habitat future(s). Extended reality (XR) and AI tools will be used to produce immersive cinema as new digital methods in participatory design for architecture and urban planning.

Aim: digital media-assisted participatory design
Output / exhibits: short immersive cinema generated with XR and AI technologies
Language: English, Cantonese and Mandarin
Capacity: 24-32 participants
Date: 3 weekends in July 2022
Venue: Physically in Hong Kong

This workshop is beginner-friendly, with user-friendly interfaces, no previous experience required. All tools are open-source and free-of-charge. Design pipeline will be localised to the context of HK, participants will work in teams together with local communities.

Hong Kong Biennale of Urbanism \ Architecture | UABB 2022

RE(DIS)COVERING THE CITY: SEEDS OF RESILIENCE | 集籽種城

BIENNALE FOR EVERYONE | 每個人的雙年展

UABB2022 is not merely a presentation platform for the design profession, but also a platform that generates collaborations and social impact. It establishes cross-disciplinary collaborations between academics, design professionals and local organisations. It will serve as a tool to create dialogue and search for effective ways of communication between the public and design professionals. Participants and audience of UABB2022 shall not be limited to architects and urban planners, and we will invite citizens outside of these professions to participate and visualise future possibilities for our city together.

Creative Statement

In an increasingly digitised age, how can we bring inclusivity into our spatial design and how can individuals represent themselves in such spaces? This highlights the significance of being able to understand the relationship between environmental sensing and human representations. Inspired by methods of backcasting planning and volumetric cinema, this workshop focuses on co-creating future vision(s) and volumetric data representation. It stands at the convergence of 4 socio-technological ideas: Participatory Design, Extended Realities, Artificial Intelligence, and Sustainable Habitats.

participatory design

Participatory design (PD) is a design method that actively involves different stakeholders in design and planning processes to ensure the outcome aligns with users’ interests. Traditional PD tools include consultation, involvement, participation and co-creation, with varying levels of engagement. Within the built environment discipline, PD considers citizens not as passive consumers and recipients of architectural services and aids, but active contributors and experts in the daily life of the city. With the help of digital tools in XR and AI, this workshop questions whether volumetric experiences and visualisation may provide more effective and affective communication.

extended realities

Extended Reality (XR) is an umbrella term referring to immersive technologies that brings together physical + digital environments (i.e. phygital), including virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR). Participants will work with XR as a co-creation tool - collaboratively generating and composing open-source 3D assets to show their vision of the future. By mapping pieces of different point-of-views together, XR may help to create not simply spatial designs, but volumetric happenings and events.

artificial intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has various definitions, but generally refers to intelligence demonstrated by computers or machines. This workshop focuses on the use of neural networks - a form of AI that is inspired by our brains. In an increasingly 3-Dimensional, seamless media environment, with emerging trends in metaverse, omniverse, and digital humans, this workshop looks at how 3D data can be synthesised and automated with the use of neural networks as scalable design workflows. How can we co-learn and co-create with AI? Participants will work with beginner and user-friendly interfaces to generate narratives, avatars, environments, and animations using AI.

sustainable habitats

In the built environment, the term ‘habitat’ summarises the array of resources - physical, social, economical, and cultural factors - that support and sustain a local and its adjacent community(s). This denotes housing not merely as the delivery of a building design, but the set of socio-economic and cultural services that go with it, and the planning of its engagement within a complex urban fabric of exchanges. Using urban analysis and ethnographic methods, participants will try to study and understand aspects of ‘sustainability’, ‘affordability’, ‘livability’, and ‘community’ along Tonkin Street, Sham Shui Po. Site and community visits will be supported by social enterprises working in the area.

TECHNOLOGY DESCRIPTION

With the aim of utilising distributive tools that are readily available to any individuals, the workflow reflects on the constraints and data fragmentation of operating within proprietary softwares. A collaborative pipeline that synthesises between open source and proprietary algorithms and softwares will be introduced to participants, with 3D data flow from machine learning (ML) to Computer Graphics (CG) modelling interfaces. Current invites participants to embed their own point-of-views as individuals, collaborating with various AI algorithms to imagine digital diversity and inclusivity - a collaborative intelligence.

In this workshop, participants have the opportunity to work with others, with a focus on collaborative scene composition. Through both technical and theoretical means, this workshop empowers participants with knowledge of volumetric cinema techniques and digital tools that are the most up-to-date and ready-at-hand.

From GPT2, StyleGAN2, PiFUHD, Blender, Houdini, Mixamo, Meshroom, to PlayCanvas and Unreal, the pipeline distributes CG needs to tools that are best at it. The workflow introduced is not a rigid methodology, but a way of thinking about how data can be standardised and translated between different interfaces: participants would have the autonomy of bringing the 3D data into their own software of choice. Instead of rejecting the tools that complicate our understanding of reality, how can we push them further and what new design terrains might we collectively discover?

The output should reflect the critical thinking that is developed on the question of how we can reclaim and contribute to a digital common and citizenry, extracting the type of information that can enrich our complex experience of reality.