NYC Design Safari

Evren Uzer

Posted on November 4, 2020 | posted by: vespa522

In this blog post we would like to focus on Uzer’s cultural values, the pandemic’s effect on her practice, and our key takeaways from Roomservices’ projects. It’s evident that in all of her work she spoke about connection. Human connection is essential when designing for the world. I really enjoyed this aspect as when designing for users, it’s important to put ourselves into the shoes of our users and think about what they want and need instead of what we think they like. This is not just important in design but in everyday life. Taking Covid’s impact on the world into account, we learned a lot from the Parametric Urban Design Tool. This tool measures abusive landlords, then numbers of which have only increased recently. Lastly, we will be highlighting what we learnt from the Dale Audio Tour project. Uzer’s approach to this tour included empathy and understanding how different people perceive the same town differently. 

The Parametric Urban Design Tool perked my interest upon hearing about it. Designing with site conditions is one of the key aspects of architecture. As the world moves to become more intertwined whilst modular, this tool will allow designers to consider different parametrics of a site in just one tool! It is a fascinating project, one which I hope to use in the future. Evren Uzer gave an example during her visit of one parameter that the tool would measure: abusive landlords. The tool would compile information from databases of complaints about abusive landlords and would then inform design. This tool has so many options available and would be great to develop and use for future designers!

The Dale Audio tours were also an interesting project she spoke about. She talked about every unique experience and feelings one had going through this small town. I felt the way she showed each person’s view of the same space speaked so much about the different perspectives about every individual she interviewed. I also liked how she saw every experience as fact and the misremembering of memories of certain events from each person was seen as the truth. The project shows how spaces are individualistic to all people and was very impactful for me personally.

Dale Audio Tour Map

Speakers and Residents of Dale

 

In conclusion, through our conversation with Evren Uzer, we learnt about how our practice can be more impactful if we lead with empathy and how we all are connected to one another. This also reminded us of our class’s community value – occupying space, and letting others occupy space. As a class, we will be taking these key takeaways along with us as we move forward with our practice! Thank you Evren Uzer for your time. It means a lot to us. We hope to stay in touch with you! 

 

By Nitya, Nalin, and Eric.