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ADS8: Data Matter: Digital Networks, Data Centres & Posthuman Institutions

Kamola Askarova

Kamola is a spatial designer with two years of experience working at architecture practice Hawkins\Brown Architects, six months working as an in-house spatial designer for global events at Facebook and six months working as a production designer at an event's construction company. She holds a bachelors degree in Architecture from the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London.

This year at the Royal College, with ADS8, her thesis project investigates the effects of digital consumption habits, the social and political consequences of the gamification of everyday life, and the subsequent spatial implications. 

Kamola's first-year project explores the impact of emerging technologies on democratic systems interrogated through critical design with ADS4. She was also part of a live research group project in partnership with British Land focused on speculating the future of retail through the lens of automation. 

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Degree Details

School of Architecture

ADS8: Data Matter: Digital Networks, Data Centres & Posthuman Institutions

This year, as the world has been closing off physical spaces, we have turned to inhabit digital spaces for information, interaction and entertainment. As a consequence, our relationship with the digital realm has dramatically changed, our habits warped and our consumption of data intensified. 

Today, one in three of us play interactive games. The virtual spaces we create are a reflection of the shifting challenges we face in society. Ideologies originated from gaming are having an increasingly influential role in the way our reality is structured. People who spend time in virtual worlds exist in a complex paradox of living in neither the physical nor the digital world in full while using resources in order to live in both to the extreme. We live between the two realms of reality, as the digital world is seen as a disembodied place existing in cyberspace. Gaming processes have become an operational platform for everyday life. The notion of 'play', once associated with the sphere of leisure activities, has been taken up as a strategy for success in consumer markets and used as a tool for sinister political agendas

Still Life: Digital Obesity

Still Life: Digital Obesity

Still Life: Digital Deprivation

Still Life: Digital Deprivation

By increasingly moving to inhabit virtual environments in favour of physical ones, we enter unfamiliar spaces. As the quality of the data we consume is decreasing, and the number of bytes we consume daily is on the rise, the average Briton is classified as Digitally Obese.

Through an investigation of game elements and a critical exploration of aesthetics used within virtual space, the project draws attention to the current condition of digital consumption habits that have become a symptom of opaque political and corporate agendas. Playing Consumption proposes a design strategy for a new health prescription service that aims to address how we consume digital information and subsequently how we inhabit virtual space. As a result, an interactive architecture emerges to encourage self-regulation and collective agency within the digital spaces we inhabit every day.

A series of playful virtual spaces: the Pixel Platform, the Fortuitous Forest, the Attention Arena & the Data Diner serve as an antithesis to compensation strategies set out to vilify digital interaction by placing emphasis on balance.
Collective AgencyConsumptionDataDigital ObesityGamingHealthIdentityInfrastructureInstitutionsPost-HumanVirtualVirtual Reality
PIXEL PLATFORM — Taking the pixel route - it's the journey.
What if the ability to instantly receive online content was more of a challenge? When calculating our individual carbon footprints, we omit the energy required to fuel our digital consumption habits, which are mostly powered by non-renewable energy sources. The movement of data is largely invisible to us as it manifests in remote physical locations around the world. Pixel Platform portrays seemingly incomprehensible technicalities of streaming infrastructure as a familiar experience of a train journey.
FORTUITOUS FOREST — Foraging for forgotten facts and forbidden fictions.
Can we reclaim true discovery in the digital realm? Those who consume information from social media platforms, display symptoms of discovery debt - which is defined as limited consumption due to a lack of variety of sources (creating and upholding echo chambers of opinion and discourse). An automatically generated OpenWorld forest allows you to forage for digital information through the lost serendipity of discovery.
ATTENTION ARENA — Personal (data) training
Surrounded by a constant stream of notifications, how can we reclaim attention? In the UK, people spend an average of 12 minutes without checking their smartphone. The Attention Arena aims to provide training to self-regulate how we give away our attention - addressing our relationship with devices. We exist in digital spaces as agents but often without agency. As such, we operate under the rules created by the host of the platforms we inhabit.
DATA DINER — All you can eat data
Amongst a sea of misinformation, how do we filter through differing truths? Content creators with politically polarising agendas flood the internet with endless streams of misinformation. At the all you can eat Data Diner, you consume Junk News in a familiar setting, where the low-quality nature of information is handed to you on a platter.

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