1. How would you differentiate and connect the ‘I’, ‘We’ and ‘They’ in your work?

We work across a range of scales from masterplanning level to the architectural detail, materiality, etc. Connected to this, we are interested in socially performative aspects ranging from neighbourhood and community environments –stimulating various forms of civic engagement, participation, cultural expression and democratic appropriation of public space- to the local scale of proxemics, private individual or intimate group space that allows for similar and different forms of urban inhabitation. I=individual, They=collective, We=architects trying to negotiate between the two –separate and as part of ‘them’.

2. How would you define ‘body’ in relation to the multiple forms of presence, interaction and spatial condition in contemporary cities?
In all scales we investigate the role of new technologies within the design process –as a new form of understanding and harvesting data from the complex ecologies of urban life, and as a way to implement the designs through a construction industry and society embedded with easily adaptable technologies. As the most visible part of human patterns of movement and interaction within the city, the bodies (their density, speed, distance, direction, clustering etc) are the manifestation of most of the invisible networks that make cities work: daily exchanges of labour, money, data, knowledge, culture. The patterns of body movements and their politics are inherently related to the machinic production cycles of city life. The city fabric is the slowly crystallised backdrop for all of these processes, informed by gradual changing tendencies and shaping new processes of progress, conflict and innovation through the physical possibilities and limitations of its geometries.

3. How would you respond to the concepts: ‘the space is a medium of the body’ and ‘the body is a medium of the space’?
’Body’ – as in the human body – is spatial both in its actual biological substance and its physiological capacities: it is designed to move, view, hear, reach through its physical environment at much larger scales than its bounding box – humans are pro-active, explorative roaming creatures that want to engage with their environment – alter it if they can. City spaces limit or set the body free – vice versa the sole purpose of spaces is to accommodate bodies and their agency. The interaction between roaming bodies and the enticement of them is basic Supply and Demand.

4. How would you orchestrate the ‘I’, ‘We’ and ‘They’ across two physical contexts (such as this year between Taipei and The Hague)?

In line with above interpretation of ‘I/We/They’, I would be interested in developing a material recording of social movement and interaction patterns over time, negotiating differences between larger scale social patterns and local, individual behaviours. Once the material recording system is developed in Taipei, it would be possible to implement it in both contexts, documenting and comparing its outcomes in different local contexts. Most likely the cultural differences as well as differences in physical site application will result in different outcomes  – but some aspects might be the same (where it would be interesting to question which and why?)

5. How would you connect the process of making/doing/actioning (which may take on different forms) with the process of experience and the construction of new identity?

The key to success in above type of experiment is the interaction between the ‘system’ and the ‘participants’ – the material recording (in the form of digital recording, translation, ‘architectural’ elements growing within the site) would need to engage and entice visitors to approach, engage with the installation –as movement and inhabitation would allow it to collect the very data it will need to live, grow and evolve. The feedback between the types of behavioural data and the capacity to influence/ alter the very same behaviour is what makes the system evolve its own ‘personality’ – the design task would be to define the relationship of the system to the people that it needs; will it lure, beg or bully and would it gradually aim to exhibit ideological, dystopian or other types of confrontational truths?

6. How would you gauge the tension between your work’s specificity and the possibility of indeterminate participatory input that jointly shapes the work in its process?
This is one of the most difficult things to balance! Without specific ergonomic, spatial, visual properties there is no enticement of an audience as people need recognisable elements within projects that also incorporate innovative, flexible or adaptable parts. In our buildings and masterplans we work with the designation of familiar or prescriptive elements and then allowing ‘the in-between’ to be generated – not as a predictable gradual transition from one condition to the other but as a flexible territory that allows for the emergence of completely different behaviours or activities when the pressures from several programs overlap. This also relates to ‘processes unfolding over time’: the rule-sets and process elements might be know at the start, while the negotiation ‘in-between’ a system and context might result in unpredictable outcomes.