Dining with Behaviors

The Interactive Restaurant consists of six major systems:
FloorScape, Ceilingscape, Tables, Vanity/Façade, Acoustics (walls), Bar

Each of these six systems is autonomous and interactive and composed to work with each other collaboratively to create an environment with behaviors. Our goal being, that if a an environment could adapt to our desires, it would shape our experience. The façade plays off of people outside of the space, the bar plays off of people preparing to enter the space, the floor plays off or the people in the space, the ceiling plays off of the floors and the vanity plays off of the people temporarily leaving the floor and translates this to the façade and to people outside of the space. Thus completing the hexagon.

FloorScape :
Seating in the interactive restaurant aims to allow customers to locate themselves instinctively in the space, which will be constantly evolving and forming groups of any size or shape. Its concept is inspired by the way that people arrange themselves on beaches and other open spaces. It focuses on customization of location, spacing, and form of social situations to optimize experience, not special efficiency. As a group forms in a particular location, they emerge to accommodate any size and shape of arrangement. The space starts out empty, but an emerging group will cause the space to form due to choices and behaviors. The seating is one element which will then influence other systems to further interact with customers.

CeilingScape:
In this space the overhead plane becomes important in defining personal dining space. This dynamically spatial ceiling creates a personalized volume of space above the diners that is not provided by the open plan of the seating and the tables. As the soft-ceiling lowers, the lighting above changes to adjust itself to create different moods to accommodate each specific party. Diners in the restaurant will be able to spatially read the dynamics of the restaurant through the ceiling forms. Tables The tables play off of the way people interact with each other while dining in making explicit in a very simplistic and visual way who is claiming the attention. Each table is four sided and has four arrays of led lights embedded within it's surface as well as a personalized microphone. As a specific person speaks, it is visualized in the array of lights that is not obtrusive to the experience of dining yet amplifies the act. The project plays off of our self-conscious behavior while in public spaces and externalizes it, allowing us to question it.

Vanity:
The vanity is a project about voyeurism and a play with social conventions of privacy in public spaces. . At nearly all parties, gatherings, and other social events the most popular location is often the bathroom. There are numerous reasons for this, for instance it is an intimate where you divulge secrets and observations. It is also a necessary place to go. Stripped to its core, what is really needed is a uni-sex vanity room. This design packages that vanity, intimacy, indulgence and sells it to the potential customers walking down the street as advertising to grab new customers. It is therefore a vanity and a façade design that plays with both social conventions and advertising.

Acoustics (Walls):
The acoustic wall plays upon our social conventions with respect to private/public spaces and our assumptions as to how we should and do behave. The wall takes our most private moments and makes them public, yet anonymous through mixing them into a recent historical context. In simpler terms it takes sound bites from the Vanity in the restaurant and mixes them with sound bites from the past in order to keep their anonymity. The Vanity is typically where secrets and discretional comments are made and therefore the most private, the acoustic wall is of course next to the bar: the most public space.

Bar:
The bar plays on the boundry between the seating space and the acoustic wall. It is a necessary architectural piece that serves as a staging ground for those waiting to be seated in the restaurant. The bar is a sculptural architectural element that notices when you approach and slides out a drink holder and automatically cools the drink with a burst of ice when the drink is placed back in the holder. The bar allows people to view those in the restaurant and hear them through the acoustic wall yet maintains a disconnection between the two by way of the anonymity of the voices in the wall. You can therefore hear people in the bar yet cannot make direct associations with who is speaking.