Collectarium Lockdown Space: Sharing domestic transformations and innovations for pandemics

(From March 2021)

It is just over one year since the UK first went into Lockdown and in this time we have had to drastically and rapidly alter the way we live. People around the globe have had to innovatively re-think and transform their domestic spaces to adapt to the new demands placed on them. The spaces of the home have been adapted to perform tasks, behaviours and practices previously conducted across a range of public and private space, as the home has become the place where we work, socialise, exercise, learn, create, entertain, play, celebrate and escape.

Collectarium by Allyson Waller and Sophie Beard is a publishing platform that creates and curates design activities to engage audiences in new ways of seeing. Collaborating with Peter Maloney, they set up the Lockdown Space project in January 2021. The project uses Instagram to collect and present observations demonstrating how people have adapted, transformed and expanded the domestic environment during this time.

The presentation will discuss submissions that reveal this rapid re-imagination of domestic space. They will evidence the innovative transformation and adaptation of the home into the office, the gym, the school, the artists’ studio, the pub, the club, the campsite, the restaurant, the beach and spaces of the imaginary. It will reflect on these outcomes to speculate how this period of rapid disruption could shape the designs and demands of the future home and the way we live in it.

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