Abstract:
The social media of the present day has allowed people to ‘instantly’ store and capture memories and images that were valuable, meaningful and relevant to them. Using photographs, videos, music, artworks, these experienced moments are constantly shared and liked (♥) by known and unknown individuals within an endless timeline. Since Social Network commenced, it cultivated new sorts of understanding of community and self-representational images. Social Network has become dominant in our culture as the means to share our images, memories and the representation of individuals in the virtual world. The power of social media is undeniable and the growth in social media has made “dramatic changes in the way we communicate through the new media technologies”1 and how we perceive our surroundings. This thesis is a response to these aspects of social media and seeks to re-examine the Social Network System (SNS) data and to investigate how the new trend can influence architecture. In particular, the thesis explores the social media application ‘Instagram’ in order to develop strategies that might allow this much used visual archive to participate in architectural design processes. How traces of physical spaces, represented through digital photography, can be incorporated in design procedures? What would be the possible approaches to utilise the new medium of social media? What are the implications of the endless digital resources on architecture? In addition, the secondary aspect of this thesis endeavours to test the cohesion of relationship between virtual and real occurring within social media. The photographic content in ‘Instagram’ captures selected aesthetic and atmospheric characteristics of the visited place and these resources from ‘Instagram’ will become the basis for developing design strategies. The process will utilise the ‘unofficial’ and ‘missed’ scenes captured by non-professionals for design. The collected material will be investigated and analysed architecturally in terms of its physical arrangements and experience revealed in the photographs. The design procedure will recompile the momentary aspects of architecture from the infinite archive, and explores how architectonics can be redefined. This thesis speculates the opportunities for place-makers, architects to engage and be inspired by the unofficial public when designing.