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^”Hacking IKEA”, a project by Taeyoon Choi focusing on the multiplicity of noise density in a busy context.

I was pretty captured by the work of Taeyoon Choi, a visual and computer artist based out of New York City and Seoul, South Korea, who combines a passion for digital interfacing with a passion for urban and human interactions to create a school of thought he calls “poetic computation”. Poetic computation allows an artist to intervene in a social space to use digital and computational tools to reorganize and reparametrize that space. In doing so, Choi enables spaces to reflect both their natural, intuitive elements of being juxtaposed against his interventions which, big or small, transform spaces in different ways.

Choi’s work is particularly reflective of a new model of architectural thinking that I’m inspired by, which is personally driving my academic path as we speak. If spaces have the power to be fundamentally altered by what we as individuals can do to them, then architects and designers have the power to optimize these spaces for complete user intervention. What does it mean for a store like IKEA, where customers slowly follow a calculated path in environments meant to reflect their own homes, to suddenly exhibit an experience so foreign to a customer that it forces them to remind themselves that they’re in a store? (See Choi’s project, linked above). How can designers use this thinking to drive the creation of spaces? These questions elevate off of Choi’s work and serve as a major inspiration for what I strive to do.