Visualising Our Future – a book edited by Antti Ahlava

Visualising Our Future

Citation

Ahlava, A. (ed.). (2024). Visualising Our Future: Designing the Public Realm Together.
Aalto University Publication Series Art + Design + Architecture. (7/2024).

ISBNS / ISSNS

• ISBN 978-952-64-2211-4 (printed)
• ISBN 978-952-64-2212-1 (pdf)
• ISSN 1799-4853 (printed)
• ISSN 1799-4861 (pdf)

Graphic design: Pekka Ijäs

Description

This book is a contribution to the research, design and development of the green transition through community retrofit, targeted especially for Finnish architecture offices, but can be useful for anybody involved with sustainable urbanism and architecture. The challenge in the green transition for architecture companies is that they have difficulties in operating in the new realm of objectives, where it is not enough to design aesthetic or purely functional artefacts, but also to support significantly higher environmental and societal goals through creative work and to facilitate evolutionary projects, where local networks develop designs that support sustainable, long-term life-cycle development. Many Finnish architecture companies have pre-conditional skills for this transition, but they need help in formulating, tuning and optimising their services in order to manoeuvre and grow their capacity in this future-facing role. This publication aims to help the architecture offices develop new sustainable business skills in a way where they should not jeopardise the widely recognised quality of Finnish architecture. The book aims to recognise and strengthen knowledge and skills especially in the Finnish architectural culture. Based on the Finnish context, the book discusses social innovation as business and hidden architectural information. We also introduce new methods and devices that can be used in any building or urban scale projects which advance sustainability: the method of qualitative evolutionary design, a digital tool for visualising future scenarios together, relationship-, activation- and value oriented service architecture approaches, as well as a scrutiny on digital media and video as tools for architecture offices which intend to advance and disseminate sustainable practices. The end of the book includes the reports of the project’s stages.

The book in electronic format is available here

Project summary & collaborating partners

This book summarises the project Visualising Our Future: Designing the Public Realm Together (VOF), which was led by Aalto University in collaboration with Tampere University. This project was financed by Business Finland, European Commission’s Next Generation EU scheme, and five Finnish consulting companies, which are listed here with their participating people:

ALA Architects

• Antti Nousjoki
• Essi Rautiola
• Thomas Miyauchi

Lukkaroinen Architects

• Laura Sorri
• Satu Fors

MUUAN

• Aleksi Rastas

Olla Architecture

• Mikko Lahikainen
• Tea Ellala

Sitowise

• Kirsi Rantama
• Matias Halmeenmäki
• Jarkko Männistö

Keywords:

urban design, building design, mobility design, sustainability, business, qualitative evolutionary design, design methods, digital tools

Project team of the VOF project:

Aalto University, Department of Architecture, Group X

• Director of the project: Professor of Emergent Design Methodologies Antti Ahlava
• Post-doctoral researcher: Laura Berger
• Doctoral researcher: Natalia Vladykina
• Research assistant and graphic designer: Pekka Ijäs (responsible for the layout of this book)

Tampere University, School of Architecture, Faculty of Built Environment, SPREAD group

• Professor of Architectural Design: Fernando Nieto
• Post-doctoral researcher: Rosana Rubio (for the beginning of the project)
• Doctoral researcher: Simon Kay-Jones

Royal College of Art, Intelligent Mobility Design Centre, London, UK

• Senior Research Fellow: Dan Phillips

SmartViz Ltd, London, UK

• CEO: Shrikant Sharma
• Computational Software Engineer: Guilherme Jardin

For more information, visit the official project page.