Empowerment Through Design: Redefining Power Dynamics in Interior Spaces

Sophia Pfleger

Out of personal curiosity, I focused on the bustling activity of the Slice, crafting a tool involving an embroidery ring and ink-dipped paper spheres to create patterns reflecting street busyness. Without knowing it at the time, this tooling exercise would dictate the whole direction my concept for the Interior Design intervention would develop.

The tool‘s maps reveal a high pedestrian turnover on the Sauchiehall Street, but my personal experience provided deeper insights. Sauchiehall Street, with its broad sidewalks and center-lane traffic, feels brisk and uncomfortable, lacking shelter. While counting pedestrians, I felt prominent, uneasy, and observed hurried walking, likely due to the street‘s discomfort. Based on these initial observations, my intervention aims to address the lack of shelter, providing pedestrians with a space for pause and comfort.

Cinemas are a part of the historical identity of Glasgow. With this intervention, I aim to strengthen that identity and reinterpret the concept of cinema, which nowadays struggles to survive.

With my speculative cinema, I want to avoid binding visitors to a specific time. It can be a short break lasting no longer than 5 minutes or a place to linger for hours. The concept aims to capture and further develop Glasgow‘s identity as a Cinema City. The Placemaking initiative also seeks to strengthen the community and revitalize the area during the daytime.

Concept

An intervention that speculates on what a modern cinema could look like, serving as a place of shelter and a possibility for a pause. The concept is supposed to be a Placemaking initiative implemented by the Scottish council.

Celebrating the Transaction of Pauses in a modern, speculative version of a cinema. I want to reinterpret individual elements of standard cinema interior architecture:

Instead of a screen, a “mirror cinema.”

Instead of the usual single seats, a seating arrangement that contributes to community exercise.

Instead of a storyline told through a film, the storyline should be told in the form of objects/installations.

Target Audience

Anyone who finds themselves on the street and yearns for a small interruption in everyday life, or perhaps is just waiting for the bus. In the intervention, one can linger for a very long time or only a short while.

The Bench

The bench, “a community exercise,” is designed with aluminum profiles sized 50mm x 50mm, intended to be assembled with rivets. The seating surface consists of a long piece of carpet, also attached to the aluminum profiles with rivets. The bench is one of the two community seating exercises in my intervention. It aims to spark curiosity among visitors and is not suitable for prolonged stays, which is not the goal of my intervention anyway. Instead, it symbolizes that in public spaces, we often sit next to strangers, like on a park bench, without feeling any interaction or connection to each other.