NOMADIC CLOUDS

Studio Theodore Spyropoulos

Tutors Mostafa El-Sayed, Apostolos Despotidis, Aleksandar Bursac

Team Al-Eryany Oula, Drayiou Daphne, Huang Yuji, Huang Yunyu

Water – whether in the form of clouds, rain, oceans, and seas – as one of the elementals that make up this earth sustains life and resources. Water touches upon every aspect of our lives. The existing global water infrastructure is largely based on centralized systems; water megastructures are the most common infrastructure that is invasive, stationary, not adaptive to natural changes and designed based on the principle of the element’s abundance.

Sadly, however, water is becoming scarcer, and its demand continuously grows. For many, accessibility to water is restricted. In many locations around the world, mostly Africa and Asia, conflicts developed around water resources, therefore transforming the latter into an element of political struggle. Therefore, the need for increasing regional adaptability arises; a call for a decentralised off-grid strategy. What if we could personalise water supply? What of we could control the clouds? What if we could drain them? By learning from the simple rules of cloud formation, our project aims to create a light water infrastructure that is movable and floating. This new infrastructure should be collective, and should capture, retain, deliver, and release water, generating a route based on a feedback loop from weather patterns and diversified demands.

We observed different behaviours and analysed their intelligence based on 3 scales. The small scale is based on the process of the nuclei condensation. The medium is defined by the accumulation of the condensation nuclei, which are influenced by external weather parameters. Their discharge as rain or snow relates to different types of formation processes that also serve as the recognising element for each type of cloud. Finally, the large scale, the weather, is based on the complex system of cloud patterns.

Learning from the intelligence of a cloud based on scale, we similarly set 3 main resolutions for our water harvesting system. In the small scale, our agents’ goal is to capture and retain water. The medium scale concerns the accumulation of agents, and its main goal is to release water, either in the form of rain or in the form of snow. The different behaviours emerge depending on the environmental conditions, but our level of control relies on the altitude in which water is released. In our final, large scale, the main goal is to search for humidity and determine responses according to the relative human demand.