CYBER ARENA

Studio Patrik Schumacher

Tutors Pierandrea Angius

Team Yingrui Xu, Andong Wang, Yiyang Zheng, Wei Peng

The massive effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on our society have triggered our research and design of a new generation of incubators. Communication and collaboration have moved into the digital domain utilising platforms like Zoom; formal events must now be scheduled following a specific protocol, while the opportunities for unexpected, informal encounters are lost. We propose to bridge physical realm with virtual interaction with an architectural design that fully meets the requirements for different degrees of mixed meetings and events.

Urban spaces are not mere physical containers that carry and channel bodies but, at the same time, constitute information-rich, navigation and semantically tagged interaction spaces. This same information-rich, semantically charged, and communicative capacity is the very essence of all cyberspaces. The mutual advancement of both technology and spatial design makes every detail of the user activities guided by information technology. Their experience is the focus of our spatial design, while new technologies are integrated from the moment users enter the incubator. These co-working incubator spaces increase the capacity of the existing urban structures, associating them with educational spaces that eventually promote greater networking and social interaction. The incubators are designed through AR and VR technologies; hence the users get an exemplary experience whether they are online or offline. Our design provides different immersive interaction schemes that can meet the user’s diverse needs, that all construct the new generation of Cyber-Urban Incubators.