Decoding Density in VR: Building Density In a Climate Emergency

Decoding Density in VR: Building Density in a Climate Emergency was 4 weeks of Ethos Lab mixed reality camps exploring concepts of building housing and food density through combining urban planning and architectural practice and live drawings with the powers of the Unity game engine.  

With an emphasis on storytelling, participants first drew out their neighbourhood designs, values and population targets. In building their neighbourhood there was a tradeoff challenge of balancing three measures of human and environmental flourishing: Ecology (environmental sustainability); Liveability (food security and shared space), and Affordability (housing security) with a second metric: density/affordability.

Once in Unity, neighbourhood designs utilized a library of prepared assets, each assigned with a score with reasons and assumptions explained, as building blocks of their community with some capacity to customize. Decisions during their neighbourhood building was reflected as a score under the three relationship categories: ecology, livability, affordability.  These scores gave a visual assessment of their decision making. As the housing and means of food production increased, Unity generated humans and animals in public spaces around town. 

The main goal of the challenge is to help the campers understand the diversity of housing models and the complex relations in our built and natural environments. That everything is consequential and relational.