Hephaistos: Royal Danish Academy x Ikea x H22 City Expo Sweden
Hephaistos: A Phenomenological Approach to Inclusive Design is a critical reflection on collaborative working methods in architectural education. It can be seen as an incisive contribution into inclusionary design and its interface with 1.1 architectural projects within an academic context. With the objective ‘to leave no one behind’, a fundamental of inclusionary thinking, we designed and built four ‘haptic’ pavilions for the H22 City Expo, a design showcase for sustainable thinking and urbanism. Insight and focus was provided by our collaborators at SUHM; four young people from The Danish association of Youth With Disabilities (SUHM).
The project conducted in collaboration with the first year Architecture, Urbanism & Landscape students at the Royal Danish Academy School of Architecture allowed and benefited from input from a number of industry partners, including: Bevica Fonden, IKEA, Spacon & X, Dinesen and SUHM. The intention was to stimulate discourse relating to architecture’s experiential potential, respective of diverse physical and mental abilities. We achieved our objectives by engaging the phenomenological capacity of architecture creating pavilions focusing on broader spectrum of sensory experience; sound, sight, smell and touch.
The intention was to challenge both the ocular centric approach typical of abstract architectural thinking and primarily the standardised metric based approach utilised in modern building regulation standards. Our intention was to reappraise their limitation instead shifting focus to a more diverse body type and ability model. The paper illustrates how a collaborative working method with inclusion of key insights from collaborators at critical work stages can reveal new, non-ocular, experiential potential for a broader, more diverse user group.
Both the built work and our subsequent critical reflection points towards potential for greater design sensitivity through a heightened awareness of differing ability models.
The project was a direct response to SDG Goal 10; ‘Sustainable Cities and Communities’ and SDG Goal 12; ‘Responsible Consumption and Production’. These were incorporated through the design of an ‘urban plan’ citing the project in Helsingborg and through the reuse and upcycling of offcut material, donated by our partner Dinesen.
https://royaldanishacademy.com/en