2019
Thesis as part of the master “Innovation by Design” at ENSCI Les Ateliers (Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle - French national industrial design school).
👉 The thesis is available online here (in French)
Passionate about urban dynamics, “city making” for people, I wanted to question: Are public spaces really open to everyone ? Can a physical space that some people “inhabit” be inhabited by “others”? Can cities offer equitable access to spaces? I used the notion of “co-habitation” and decided to study interactions between public spaces users and try to understand how to ease cohabitation in these spaces. The goal was to understand what hides behind space “co-occupation”: from indifference to shared experiences, going through tensions and compromises.
Literature research: sociology, anthropology, urban design, architecture
Immersion: “panoramic” observations of parisian public spaces (squares, community gardens, public libraries, parks, “third places”), focus on public libraries for further observations with a particular attention to interactions, mediation, spaces programmation.
Interviews of libraries users and directors.
Tool prototyping: after analyzing spaces and focusing on public libraries as a model of successful cohabitation, I created a tool (set of cards) to help create more inclusive public spaces.
User research (immersion, interviews, observations), sociology, urban design