d r a w i n g s
d r a w i n g s
d r a w i n g s
community service initiative
E-JOURNAL REFLECTIVE WRITING
I N T R O D U C T I O N
Community Initiative Service (CSI) is a module designed to provide students the opportunity to engage in collaborative work with the community, strengthening social and communication skills, to develop a holistic awareness towards issues and problems presented, apply information management skills and strengthen their lifelong academic learning. Throughout and by the end of this module, students are expected to portray leadership qualities and to work effectively as a team; and increase a sense of social responsibility towards their community and society.
With 5 other teammates, our team chose to join a competition titled "Pandemic Architecture Ideas Competition Open Call" which was organised by ARCHISEARCH.gr. The competition require us to rethink/redesign emergency spaces (city strategies, hospitals, cemeteries, sanitary spaces, etc.) or living spaces (homes, workspaces, apartments, public spaces, hotels, etc.).
For our group, our proposal is to address the problem of the low-income groups who live in low-cost flats that have limited spaces of roughly 700 square feet. Like every other person, these individuals have to work from home during the pandemic, however, they do not have such areas due to insufficient spaces and the lack of flexibility in the space. Hence, their productivity and privacy will be affected. So, we redesigned the spaces, so that each space, by responding to inhabitants’ needs to adapt to the situations, can be turned into spaces with different functions while fulfilling their personal needs.
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P R O G R E S S
Our tutors, Dr. Camelia, Ar. Lim Sze Ee assisted us to communicate with two architects from VERITAS group, Mr Miguel (Dr. Arq. Miguel Ángel Robles-Cardona) and Ms. Farah Yusof to be our consultants in this competition. We had 5 meetings with tutors and VERITAS group on Zoom to discuss and refine our ideas.
Week 1: As a Year 1 student, we don't know anything professional so we divided into 3 sub groups to research on different aspects which are living, emergency design and urban planning. We proposed to our draft idea, TRANSPOSABLE CITY, in the first meeting. After that, we did future discussion after received feedbacks and opinion from tutors and consultants.
Week 2: We proposed a new idea of movable area in the house. Our intention is to release people's stress when they are being quarantined in an area for long period during pandemic. However, it require high construction costs and there were a lot of problems. Then, we narrow down our target users to affordable housing.
Week 3: We finalised our target users as low income group (B40) who live in low cost flat (PPR) in Selangor. Psychologically, people will fell stress if they stayed in a confined space for a long time. PPR is a low cost flat that as only 700sqm that usually need to fit a family. People are not allowed to work or only work from home, they will face financial stress, working stress that worsen the situation. We wish to propose a design solution by architecture to solve the problem from this group of people.
Week 4: We put forward idea of flexibility and adaptability. We promote inter-generational living and people can personalise the space according to the number of people in their family that up to 6 people. In the last week, we did sketch up models, diagrams, abstracts and video.
R E F L E C T I V E
I would like to appreciate and thank my teammates were willing to take this initiative to join a international competition even though we are still year 1 students and we know nothing to compete with other professions in this competition. We decided to challenge ourselves and took it as a learning process. Due to the pandemic situation, we had to do online learning at home, we needed to attend classes and complete our own assignments, at the same time, we also need to contribute our time for this competition. We arranged our schedules and had a lots of sleepless nights to have meetings for brainstorming, discussion on our ideas, making sketch-up models and completing the presentation board and video. During that time, we always worked together and even waited until all the teammates finish their works even though some of us were done our jobs. I learned how important teamwork is, as well as communication to avoid misunderstandings and arguments. All of the teammates were trying their best to give contributions and get things done perfectly.
Moreover, our lectures, Dr. Camelia and Ar. Lim Sze Ee also helped us a lot in this competition. They helped us to contact with architects from VERITAS group, Mr. Miguel and Ms. Farah to be our consultants. Without their guidance and feedbacks, we might lost our directions and being confused during the process, thus we will not going to improve and develop our works. I am grateful and honour to have their professional knowledge and support. They were willing to spend more time for extra meeting to giving us more suggestions and immediate feedbacks to improve our works in the last week, they even helped us to think about the content of presentation board and the video style.
In a nutshell, sudden strike that cause by Corona Virus has brought a big effects to our community. People are forced to stay at home, some of them lose their jobs, this worsen the situation for low-income groups or those without savings. From this competition, I have learnt a lot and knew more about the situation for different social groups in this pandemic period. I get more professional knowledge and have a clearer way of how I could contribute back to society as an architect in the future. I would continue to explore more on my architectural journey.
