Luka Smišek

The design of domestic space has not changed in the past decades. Architects and inhabitants of domestic space blindly follow norms of domestic space design without questioning them or critically reflecting on homes. While society is rapidly changing, our domestic spaces remain in the past. We care only about trends and tastes that are mechanisms of a capitalistic system, without taking into account our habits in space and all the affordances that common objects of domestic space offer.

How do we move forward?

Instead of hastily trying to solve problems that we don’t even understand, I choose to through speculation and humour find problems and unlearn domestic space. To imagine how things could be instead of how they should be. 

I make physical fictions from orphaned objects that I find on the streets, leftovers of changing domestic space. By using these objects as material, I do not rely on inaccessible or new technologies in order to speculate. They provide limitations, inspiration, familiarity and thereby a challenge.  I start from an abstract idea that develops in my mind from asking the question “what if”. I then build through intuition, in an ad hoc way, for a specific purpose of creating a tool for research. These physical fictions change our habits, what objects of similar kind usually afford and create an implication. I return the physical fiction into the context of domestic space and play with it, think and talk about it. Through each object I find out something new. 

In that way I create knowledge as an outcome of my research-through-design, pose it as a rhetorical speculative question and create a starting point for me, but also for others to change how we approach the design of domestic space.