The Interior Design Exquisite Corpse Experiment

My thesis this semester will have several components, one of which is an experiment I will be conducting with Greg Tew. Since I'm exploring the relationship between time and authenticity (can a design be authentic to place and time - something that is very much of the here and now?), we thought it would be interesting to simulate a design that is produced over time (as opposed to a "one-shot" solution that generally occurs in the design world).

I will be working with Greg's Contemporary Issues/Business Procedures class (mostly juniors in the Interior Design program), on what I'm calling "The Interior Design Exquisite Corpse Experiment." The exquisite corpse is a game that has existed for a while: originally played as a word game, where the players would take turns writing a sentence on a piece of paper, folding it over and passing it along, to unv, eil a bizarre collection of phrases (a "story") in the end. The Surrealists took the idea and applied it visually, producing strange images.I'd like to extend the game further, into 3D imagery.

Exquisite Corpse exercise by André Breton, Jaqueline Lamba and Yves Tanguy.

The parameters for the experiment are as follows:

1. Students will be provided with a Google SketchUp model of the existing space (modified to suit the experiment).
2. Students are asked to make an intervention. They can change only one thing in the building. This can be in the form of a simple addition, or a subtraction followed by an addition.
3. Their intervention cannot "undo" any action conducted in the last 5 "moves."
4. Students must turn in their modified Sketchup Model, a perspective and a floor plan of their proposed change, and a brief statement explaining their decision-making process.

There are about 21 students in the class that meets Wednesdays and Fridays. Each class period, one student will be given the space and asked to make an intervention; the following class period, the student will present their subtraction/addition and will pass the model to the next student.

For the experiment we will be using a modified version of the space I am addressing in my thesis project: the coffee shop in Johnston Student Center at Virginia Tech. Currently, the space is somewhat functional, but does not fulfill the site's potential as a Third Place. Third Places, as defined by Ray Oldenburg, are those at which people congregate that are not First (work) or Second (home) places. Third places are often free/inexpensive, have access to food/drink, are proximate (waLking distance from First/Second places) and have regulars. The site was chosen for my thesis because it fulfills three of the four qualifiers: it is inexpensive (coffee in general is overpriced, but this is cheaper than Starbucks), has access to food/drink, and is proximate (for Virginia Tech's campus community). Yet it lacks regulars - perhaps because the atmosphere is not the "home away from home" Tech's website professes it to be.

Some questions arise: What does a Third Place look like? Lisa Waxman's research on coffee shops as Third Places provides some insight; her research concludes that place attachment occurs in coffee shops based on several variables, some of which include architectural and environmental factors (ex: cleanliness, day lighting, comfortable furnishings). But that doesn't answer the question of aesthetics. An archetype of the coffee shop should be open, like Downing's domains; yet today, the coffee shop has a certain image (slouchy couches, wooden café tables, chalkboard menus, etc.) that is quite limiting. Is it possible, then, to "update" the image of the coffee shop to reflect the identity of our time (there is no reason a coffee shop of 2009 has to look like the first Starbucks store opened in 1971). Can we open up the type to an archetype? What does the domain of Third Places look like, and how can a coffee shop embody this domain?