> Fighting Loneliness: The City as a playground

> France

>FINALIST

Team Members:

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Marc El Samran

The idea is to be able, through an urban installation within the city, a permanent connection between different constituent factors of the public sphere, while promoting a participative approach of the citizen and allowing him to create his own space within the city through an immersive public plaza. Considering Constatnt Nieuwenhuys ‘work, the main concept is to allow the human to play in an open space, where he is liberated from all his daily concerns.

In order to fight loneliness effectively, the idea is to allow a personal and gradual discovery of the installation through a sensorial approach within the city. Through motion, video and sound sensors, mounted in the installation and across the city, the “flaneur” will be able to interact with another unknown user (“the familiar stranger”) through screens, lights or sound, thus allowing a more accessible approach to people who normally avoid social interactions. Social integration, can then be achieved in a more adapted way while leaving the option to the user to retract at any time, giving him a decision-making role in this interaction. The fact that he is in control of his involvement in that process can put him in a more confident state and ensure that the interaction is not forced. This playful setting, that could be dispatched in a more discreet way thought he city, revolves around a more immersive central element that recreates an interactive public space.

This element should be a more emblematic component in the city, and allow through the different devices scattered, to attract the user to an urban plaza that takes the same immersive specificities mentioned. The cocooning shape permits the creation of diverse typologies of spaces allowing different levels of interaction while accentuating the playful aspect of the created space.