Furnish - Design Proposals: AEIOU Amplification element for interactive open urbanismEAUM & I+D+ARQ

Abstract

FURNISH is organizing an open call to select 4 teams throughout Europe which will digitally fabricate and deploy urban elements for the purpose of adapting temporary public spaces to meet the new challenges and opportunities presented by the COVID-19 crisis. FURNISH aims to merge the challenge of gaining more public space through ‘tactical urbanism’, which can reconfigure a street to expand the area for pedestrians and leisure, with local digital manufacturing. The call is open to Fab Labs, research groups, designers or makers able to produce rapid solutions to the urgent spatial problems and opportunities posed by the novel coronavirus. Interested teams must submit their qualifications between September 10 and September 25, along with a declaration of responsibility for testing their designs with end users and (not compulsory but favourable) evidence of having sought a letter of support from a local institution expressing interest in hosting the pilot installation (e.g. a municipality, university campus, cultural centre, etc.). The objective is to develop the designs and prototypes in collaborative workshops featuring all the selected FURNISH teams, therefore it is not necessary to have a design prepared to apply. Pilot installations will be installed and tested by December. Each selected team will receive up to 10.000€ to fund the fabrication and implementation of their prototypes. All designs developed under the FURNISH project will be documented in an open-source format, enabling replication anywhere in the world. The AEIOU (Amplification Element for Interactive Open Urbanism) prototypes are movable autonomous spatial devices that allow to amplify sound due their megaphone shape in diverse urban contexts. The design was thought to amplify the sound of drums, as they are used at the Pinheiro parade, in the city of Guimarães. The prototypes design was supported by parametric modelling tools, namely for the design and discretisation of the curved surfaces of the “megaphones”. The structure of the prototypes and surfaces are produced by CNC milling process, with a structure defined by a contouring system, built in birch plywood (30 mm thickness). The AEIOU prototype intends to generate new ways of expressing a traditional event, by means of an interaction that keeps social distancing but simultaneously reaches the greatest number of people, spreading the positive feeling that is present in such a traditional celebration.