At the start of my field project my brain was full of ideas and concepts that I wanted to experiment with for this design brief. After thinking long and hard about all the possibilities available I decided to go with a design which was incredibly personal to me. Underpasses were designed and built in order to create easy and quick access to different sections of cities without the need to wait for the traffic to stop on the road to let you pass. In many ways these are a genius invention as they help reduce pedestrian road traffic accidents and allow individuals to get to and from places in a quick and efficient manner. However, on the other hand these places can be scary, potentially dangerous and incredibly ugly. Most underpasses are the same in every city around the world; they only serve to facilitate one main function which is allowing pedestrians to cross roads quickly. The design of underpasses is ugly and often get defaced by graffiti, which further degrades the aesthetic of the space. This graffiti is a way of the community making their mark on the space and trying to make a boring space increasingly more interesting.
Therefore, my aim is to encourage the community to feel connected to the city by increasing the safety and aesthetic appearance of the spaces which connects the city together. I decided to create a name for this project as I thought it was important to give my design a purpose; I chose to call this design “Cardiff’s connecting colours”. The city of Cardiff is connected via a variety of different underpasses and I thought it would be incredibly fun to increase the aesthetic appearance and purpose of these forgotten and abandoned spaces. In the future I would like to expand this project and collaborate with a variety of different designers to improve the underpasses and design a different aesthetic appearance to each of them. Collaborating with different artists and designers will enable each space to be unique in their own way and portray something different.
As an interior design student, I decided to portray my ideas using SketchUp, photoshop and by producing a sketch model. I thoroughly enjoyed working on SketchUp for this project as I was using bright and bold colours which inevitably created a fun and interesting space. At the start of the design I found it hard to obtain the right lighting for the space, which was incredibly frustrating. However, once I rectified this problem both SketchUp and V-ray rendering worked smoothly. Once I had obtained the visuals, I wanted I used photoshop to add details which would make the design look like it was within the space. This was very fun and allowed me to see what my design would look like when placed in the selected space.
One thing which I wanted to try and formulate within this project was the use of car energy on the road to stimulate the lights in the underpass. After completing some research into this technique, I came across a website which describes the use of speed bumps which generate energy to power street lights. “A conventional speed bump wastes a huge amount of energy when a car is forced to bring itself from a higher, more efficient cruising speed to almost zero. Large cities have a high number of speed bumps – and an equally high level of traffic.” (Rauneek, n.d.) Therefore, storing this energy and using it to generate light energy for the underpasses light installations will be incredibly sustainable.
Bibliography
Rauneek. (n.d.). Bright Hub Engineering . Retrieved from Energy from speed bumps : https://www.brighthubengineering.com/hvac/32750-a-new-way-for-generating-energy-speed-bumps/
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