RS1. Intelligent Cities |

We believe that there are a thousand ways to make people happy although most of them involve some combination of expectation and gratification. Tourism for example usually has a lot of expectation around it. We want to experience a different way of life, because (and I think we can all agree) people want whatever it is they don’t have.

A life spent in pursuit of pleasure can in fact an admirable choice. So long as nobody gets hurt hedonism can actually be a pillar of a utopian society. We can look at A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley as an example of a hedonistic society. However one way that this civilisation fails is the lack of choice and the rigid definitions of pleasure.

Two of the earliest schools of thought on pleasure were the Epicurean and the Stoic, each of which provides a completely different outlook although surely both are valid. To put it simply whether you volunteer at the children’s hospital or pretend to be Christian Grey good for you! We don’t judge.

Hedonistic societies are often associated with freedom and food and orgies , but could just as easily encompass education and sports and health care. However aside from social needs or individual wants what else can give us pleasure?…

…Can architecture? Certainly it can! How does sitting by an open window while it’s raining make you feel? Or being a hundred stories up and seeing the city moving beneath you?These are just two examples of the millions of ways architecture can give each us individuals pleasure. Therefore what we propose putting the power back into the hands of the collective.

Already we can see that technology is enabling people to have more input on the greater movements of society and the economy ; for example Kickstarter and Wikileaks. We imagine that the future will be a kind of “hyper-democracy” where governments will no longer have leaders because every decision can be made by referendum. People will have more responsibility for their regional politics, economy and even their urban environment. To that end we have reduced human desire into three spatially quantifiable pairings – sun and shade, space or proximity, and exclusivity or inclusivity.