Increasing urbanization, denser urban life, more expensive apartment prices and higher rents are changing the way we enter and use urban space. Websites that share rooms are a sign of the cost of living in cities, indicating that people urgently need to consider sharing rooms with strangers. These apartments are no longer houses.
If people cannot spend time in apartments (because the time is too crowded, too noisy or not safe enough), they will end up spending more time in quasi-public places such as libraries or game halls or shopping malls. Rem Koolhaas, the award-winning architect of Prizker in the Netherlands, calls it “junk space”. Or they spend time in the streets, squares and parks.
How can cities satisfy people in these places? Imagine a house with furniture we usually see on the street. Will it be comfortable?
Usually, the design of such public furniture has a strictly defined range. It must be destructive, easy to install, require little or no maintenance, discourage littering, and match the regional style.
Public furniture also has certain types-mainly benches and chairs. This limits what we can do in public (sitting upright, we cannot relax). These are part of the design considerations and provide benches for people to sit on.
More than just sit and stop
The spacing, location and location of furniture in the public space play a big role in determining what I can look at, who I look at, how long I sit there, and how I feel.
But what if I want to do more and sit there? For example, where can I plug in my mobile phone or laptop to charge?
It is not easy to wash hands in public places. For example, I have sat down and ate an orange on the bench. My hands are sticky and I want to wash it. Maybe I took off my jacket while sitting there. What should we do now?
I have to find the nearest public toilet and use the sink, but where are all my other belongings when doing this? On the toilet floor?
The basic human right is access to water and utility services. We need to provide this access in the public domain, not just in commercial environments such as coffee shops.
If you can afford it, filling a bottle of water is not easy, buying water is easy. This is not a fair solution. This adds to the already high financial burden of paying high rents and urban life.
Consider how the design expands our range of options
Although we furnish the streets with furniture, the streets, parks and squares lack other services. The design embeds narrow social text in the current street furniture collection. The design of new public furniture needs to adapt and provide citizens with more and more choices to enable them to enter the city.
For example, people should be able to use the facilities for basic healthy lifestyle habits, such as washing hands. They also need access to electricity-perhaps even facilities to heat food, such as homemade lunches or pre-prepared meals in the supermarket.
Placing such new public facilities in public spaces can transform and soften them, bringing familiarity, comfort and living feeling; a public backyard. The opportunities for smart cities not only lie in large-scale infrastructure, public transportation and traffic monitoring, but also at a more granular level.
These new street furnishings can be provided to users through modern digital versions of old city gates. It can require them to log in or authorize them to use the device with a unique identifier. We have implemented this on e-commerce and sharing economy websites.
This new type of public street furniture can be embedded with sensors to monitor and respond to its usage in real time. Interactive furniture can be part of a larger dedicated data system. It can notify relevant departments that if the power point consumes too much power, or the noise level of the power point is too large for the time of day, in response, turn off the lights and power.
The parameters can be tested, and the calibration of usage and user mode can be explored according to neighborhood expectations. The system can then autonomously react to the collected data.
Street furniture can be redefined as connected interactive devices. They will then provide a gateway so that people can access daily utilities. Moreover, by doing so, these new facilities can provide quasi-family convenience facilities in the public domain, thereby making the city a fairer and more pleasant place for everyone.
Inspiration from Shared Homestay
On the one hand, it is the unique nostalgia of contemporary people. I have seen such a sentence in an article, human beings are a very emotional animal, and feelings can be the most upsetting thing. While enjoying the rapid social and economic development and increasing national income, contemporary people have never stopped following in the footsteps of nostalgia. Therefore, nostalgic topics such as “classic old TV series” to “hand-written letters, canvas shoes” and “we were so beautiful when we were young” on social platforms such as Weibo and Zhihu can always stir the hearts of many people, attract people to participate, and cause big problems. Scale discussion.
On the other hand, consumers are pursuing personalized and human accommodation needs. At present, with the increase of national income, the pressure of life is also increasing day by day. The traditional hotel management model is the same, with little difference in decoration style, lack of personalization and human touch, and can not let consumers relax.
In this context, more and more people are beginning to choose shared homestays with a more personalized and humane accommodation experience. Whether it’s a bowl of soy milk from the boss in the morning, a flower from the boss, a smile from the tourists, or a conversation with like-minded tourists, shared homestays have a different accommodation experience from traditional hotels. Shared homestays must be clear about their product positioning, and do not blindly follow the trend, resulting in the same product. Merchants can develop special products for different consumer groups based on the humanities of their region, such as launching parent-child cultural shared homestays, pet-themed shared homestays, couples-themed shared homestays and other products to attract consumers with different needs.
In general, shared homestays are accompanied by opportunities and challenges in the development process. Consumer sentiments have given shared homestays unique innate advantages. Coupled with people’s pursuit of personalized and humane accommodation experience, this industry has been boosted. development of.
