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Stand by you
Service Design | Web Design | Building Design
Designing for an uncertain and unknown future at a global scale.
The year 2020 brought us one of the biggest challenges that we as humanity are facing — Covid-19. Covid-19 has brought a rude awakening to the potential of the existential threats facing humanity today. We have both the rare opportunity and the essential need for reinvention. It is recognised that many other cataclysmic events may emerge in the near future. For humanity to thrive, we must prepare for and respond to these events with forbearance and creativity. With life potentially unable to continue as before and with a view to fruitfully moving past these undetermined periods, urgent new ideas and amelioration for the rethinking of physical spaces, necessary products, tools, communications, and progress are needed...
In this project, we developed a project
to contribute and to solve one of the biggest problems that most people are facing and feeling in today’s world — loneliness.
Loneliness is something that anyone of us can experience, be disturbed by or even feel sick or depressed by. We witness that it affects a lot of people from all kinds of backgrounds and age groups, whether they are married
or single, whether they are having kids or not, whether they are young or old, everyone may experience loneliness.
Loneliness isn’t a problem that is faced by just a few, it is
a phenomenon that is widespread and can hit anyone at any time.
Our design is a community platform called STAND BY YOU. This platform target people who are experiencing the feeling of loneliness and aims to bring them together globally or locally. Our challenge lies in designing a platform that will include everyone. This platform is designed for humanity. Therefore, our actions are carefully studied to not affect the environment or other human beings in a harmful way.
We are designed for the people, for humanity.
Our research and own experience showed that creating a community to connect with can be incredibly empowering. Key insights were also that it is essential to create an infrastructure for shared activities as this helps tremendously in forming long-lasting connections between people. By offering such a space we seek to help to make this world a little better, step by step.
As a result, we designed a multi-layered platform that is applied both online and offline. On the online side, we designed a digital platform for people to explore and connect online. This digital space is then extended by a physical offering in the shape of local community hubs. Both are designed as safe spaces for people to express themselves and to make meaningful connections while being supported both locally and globally.
Our core ingredient in this equation is to rebuild people's connections and the channels of communication they lost at some point,
or maybe never even had. Getting into a trusting circle of
friends or community is a key to relapsing from
a deep state of loneliness.
This community hub is essentially just a natural extension of our online platform. It offers in-person meet-ups, events and hosts activities. Depending on their location, these hubs may look very different from one another, so we created three example locations to illustrate their potential appearance and use case.
Design for Desert Climate:
focus on North Africa and the Middle-East
Our first design would be suitable for a desert climate and when designing, we focused on North Africa and the Middle East. The core idea was the use of local and affordable materials tied together by a simple and approachable construction.
The circular formality invites discourse and interaction, but at the same time provides a safe and quiet place. While most areas are open for all kinds of use cases, some are specifically designed to foster conversation, enable a quiet retreat, or open up for activities such as light sports, board games, or else.
Design for Tropical Climate:
focus on Southeast Asia and Singapore
Our second design is focused on a region with a tropical-hot and humid climate, for example in southeast Asia, which has a
high all-year-round precipitation level.
With Singapore being the destination example, material availability would be abundant, with the most accessible, eco-friendly,
and climate-resistant being bamboo as a basis for
the whole structure.
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The design is focused on creating a safe space for meeting new people or even to reflect on oneself amidst the city. Surrounded by nothing but plants, which are nestled into the bamboo structure not only offers shelter from the daily stress of the city but also encourages peaceful and relaxing activities like yoga, reading, or gardening.
All the walls are made from bamboo with hemp-filled boxes placed inside of them. The walls can either be used for solely aesthetic plantations or on the other hand for the gardening of a multitude of fruits and vegetables.
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Design for Temperate Climate:
focus on Central Europe
Our third design is based in a temperate climate such as Europe. Temperatures and rainfall generally are moderate yet can vary greatly over the course of a year and depend on the location. Economic buying power generally is quite good and material availability is excellent. Also, building a structure as a community is seen as very empowering.
We chose a simple, easy-to-build structure that is made from wooden beams and finished with transparent roofing, aluminum siding panels, and some wooden cladding wherever wanted.
Raised beds and a large open area are inviting people to take a deep dive into gardening, relaxing, picking up community activities, or just meet some friends. When it gets colder, roll-down sidings can close off the structure to create a more protected inside.
Our platform provides solutions
based on empathy.
Trying to solve a wicked problem is always a challenging thing to do. However, if we want to create and design a positive, futuristic, timeless, and humanistic project, we need to think about the problem from more than one perspective, look at the situation as multi-layered, and try to figure out any pain points.
Therefore, in our project situation, we looked and investigated deeply who is involved in the problem of loneliness.
As a result, our platform STAND BY YOU provides solutions that are based on empathy and ecological sustainability, while respecting and supporting a zero-waste policy. Therefore, we can claim that we as a group of designers, creators and storytellers responded to this wicked problem and provided solutions that cover more than just one aspect.
In our opinion, Designers should always think about how to create a solution that will suit today's life and offer a way to solve the current problem, however thinking about the future and how it is going to affect our legacy as human beings and the environment is equally, if not even more important.
Trying to solve a wicked problem is always a challenging thing to do. However, if we want to create and design a positive, futuristic, timeless, and humanistic project, we need to think about the problem from more than one perspective, look at the situation as multi-layered and try to figure out any pain points.
2020 Global Experimental Live-Lab
[GEL-Lab] Design Studio
Our project was provided and cooperated with the Globally We Design 2020 Global Experimental Live-Lab Design Studio.
GloWD’s GEL-Lab Design Studio presents a unique opportunity for multi-disciplinary, multi-generational, and multi-national intellectuals and creatives to collaboratively and iteratively explore new design frontiers for all aspects of applied design into the
future through virtual means and methods.
The studio was structured with eight teams in two tracks. Each team was comprised of multi-cultural, multi-national, and multi-disciplinary members.
Design studio participants, spanning five continents from eight different institutions and design programs, worked with a diversity of home institution faculty. Overcoming time zone challenges, the 2020 GEL-Lab Design Studio groups benefited from international and expert input from around the world.
For more information, please visit the GEL-Lab website.
the stand by you team
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