A Family Integration Project (AFIP)BACKGROUND
The gap selected presents a very real problem for us the short people from the tropic, here the average height is 1,70 meters in man and 1,60 in women, so when my mom who's height is 1,57 cm tries to get the utensils from the cupboard (or any women of the family) she has to use a staircase she hides behind the fridge, it is very uncomfortable when she's cooking because without it she cannot reach the crockery or the pans. I believe a good design does not need from another artifact to function, meaning, that in order to use the kitchen I do not need from a staircase for it. The reality is that without the staircase we climb up the kitchen stools to put away the groceries or taking them out, it’s annoying. So as an architect, a designer, a creative person I couldn’t stand any longer not thinking of a solution to it and because I want to explore the interior part of the architecture I thought of a remodel project for my kitchen to develop in this 8 weeks. Being what it is to live in Venezuela, here the concept of rental do not exist anymore as what it is, to lend or rent to someone your belongings for a price in a length of time pre-established, if you rent your apartment here your putting yourself in the risk of losing your apartment, the tenant of it that will pass to the persons you’re renting it, so the rental part of my project it’s really non-existent. Buying a new apartment here is around the 1.000.000.000 Bs and the minimum salary here is 2.700.000 and the selling is controlled by the government so you cannot sell it above the price they say that in general is 700.000.000 Bs so thinking about selling your apartment is really really difficult here, and even thinking of selling the apartment, the average height in women in the country do not pass the 1,60 meters, could reach the 1,67 but it’s really weird to find a women above that height, so designing a cupboard for the minimum height (1,60) it’s not really an issue.
Giving this five weeks so far, I'd realized that the problem is not only that of the reachable cupboard but is also the lack of communication between the family during dinner when eating, the serving hatch makes us seat side by side and not in front of one another and that really makes a difference in the social interaction between us, also there is the problem of the lack of preparing areas, they are all separated in three spaces from 40 centimeters wide each one, not enough space when cooking three to four things at a time. THE DESIGNING PROCESS Interviewing my family and close friends about the problems the kitchen represents to each one of us, made me realize that there was much more to it that the sole problem of the stuff falling down the cupboard, those extra spicy upgrades were in the user’s needs that were generally put in four categories. The kitchen holds all the cookwares The kitchen requires minimal effort to cook The kitchen improves family life The kitchen fits unobtrusively in my life Then The ideas went wider when I decomposed the problem by sequence of user actions, because it really made me analyze every step of the way, in this project there’s really a big gesture that is the overall remodel project, which is the furniture’s and their position, taking down the wall that in real life has a serving hatch, but there’s also minimum gestures that are the disposition of the utensils, how you’re going to reach for them, how you’re going to open the doors of the cupboard, the color contrast, the materials of everything, how they react to the grease of the kitchen and to cleaning them up… It’s more to it that it seems. Overall the designing process was just like yours, following the instructions of every week, but outside of it I wasn’t designing for a wider range of individuals, actually the design was for my mum, so as a designer of architecture and venturing in the interiors, I was following a few but really important schemes or directions from her, like:
FURTHER TESTING So what is left for this design is to show it to my mum and see if she approves it and in a future when the materials here in the country appear again or the cost are again accessible to everyone, well, make the remodeling work. And if she find some things that aren’t of her likes, refine the project again until it satisfies her.
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