STEMcloud

by ecoLogicStudio

STEMcloud has been developed as a parametric furniture system able to generate spatial atmospheres (clouds) by providing light filtration, privacy and oxygenation. STEM cloud promotes a concentrated experience of man-nature interaction in dense urban contexts where the presence of traditional vegetative systems is close to zero. A series of plug-ins add functionality and customization to the system, introducing artificial lighting, objects containers, pin-up surfaces, etc.

The parametric nature of the single modules allows for a computational definition of the overall clouds; environmental gradients of solar radiation, people flow intensity, co2 emissions can be computed and used as generative environments for the developments of specific clouds/assemblages of STEM.

The concept of STEMcloud has been developed for a specific area of London where the new artistic/creative business is now taking place. Artistic behavior once considered characteristic of small marginalized groups foreign to the business world, has now gained a new centrality in the social economy. While traditional forms of business, typical of the age of the machines, were defined by strong, stable and centralized organizational models, artistic business proliferate following fields of an energy that is more relational than productive. The phenomenon is easy to observe in the east of London, where new crowds have occupied territories once devoted to heavy material production. For most of them profit is produced through a renewed capacity to expand their network of relations and platforms of interaction. Such a socio-economic model actualizes in the urban territory like a form of weather, constantly agitated by the changes in the gradients fields of estate market, service connectivity, and environmental pleasure. The creative entrepreneur reads the city as an experiential rather than as a formal reality, his space filled with products able to generate open and temporary systems, sensorial and perceptive structures; artificial clouds providing atmospheric and operational re-fictionalization of space in real time. STEMcloud engages the artificial landscape of Shoreditch, developing furniture system capable of introducing concentrated urban oxygenation as a mean to promote novel creative man-nature interaction.