2024 - Begin to Breathe: Light as Trigger

BACKGROUND AND RESEARCH
City bus stops are our design objects. As privatization continues to encroach on the city, the bus station has become the last real public space. At the same time, most people living in the city will choose buses as the means of transportation in a large number of life scenarios, so choosing bus stops as the basis of design may have a good urban effect. Therefore, we hope to explore more possibilities in the bus station, and eventually make it a system that can produce urban functions and more human values, enhance the importance of public space, and make it a new urban resource.
Before we started the design, we found three phenomena through the observation of the existing bus stops:
1. Unconscious: People at bus stops don’t care about the people passing by or what’s happening.
2. Waiting with Anxiety: In the crowded and urgent modern city life, people are anxious while waiting for the bus. However, this time and space could have produced what is known in Chinese culture as ”leisurely”: people open their senses to get close to the world around them, to feel the changes of the sun, the approach, the passing of others, and then to leave.
3. Traces: There are traces of any existence. These traces touch each other in the moment when we are not aware of it, and then these micro-connections grow into warm urban memories. Through this subtle connection, people become aware of the world around them.
GOALS
We want to make a modern ”pavilion”, that is, the spiritual breathing space of the city, to awaken people’s perception of themselves and the existence around them through the traces left by the walking people and the changing sunlight, to break the modern anxiety atmosphere of only pursuing efficiency and precision, and to enjoy the leisure of this moment. This is a process of transformation from the unconscious to the conscious, and the ideological changes brought about are imperceptible, and at the same time, with the help of the urban effect of the bus station building type itself, the subtle ideological changes are gradually amplified, and finally form a resonance in the whole city.
CONCEPT AND PROTOTYPE
Light is the trigger condition for the sensor to change from a dormant state to an excited state. The traces left by people walking around in the space are the varying infrared intensity. Similarly, the changing rays of the sun throughout the day leave traces in the space with different light intensities.
In the bearing of space traces, we choose the voile to express the ambiguous emotion, people feel the emotion from the space, but also tilt towards the space, which is a two-way communication and ambiguous process. Due to the pulling of different angles and heights of the fishing line, the voile forms different shapes and folds.
A space that is sensitive to the movement of people and dynamic sunlight is formed.
Light is the trigger point for the transition from the unconscious to the ”leisurely” experience. The subtle changes on the voile are noticeable due to the direct sunlight and reflections. When people wait for the bus at the station, the dynamics of the voiles prompt them to discover new worlds: the voiles are folded because a cloud passes overhead, the voiles are raised because it is noon, the voiles are staggered because someone approaches and leaves…