Quiet: We Live In Public
Home in the Age of Spatial Computing and Social Networks
Bachelor Thesis / Design Studio @./studio3
#Home as Infinite Screen #Exploratory Objects #1:1 #XR #Multipurpose Domesticity #Expanded Materiality #Spatial Computing as Spatial Practice #PublicVSPrivate #Architecture as Inhabitable Media Hybrid #Here&There #Crossprogramming #SocialVR #SocialMR #Unity3D #Superimposition #Spatial Internet
In this one-year-long bachelor studio, we’ve been exploring how architecture responds to the shifting nature of domesticity as media technologies become embedded in everyday spaces—structuring how we live, share, and are seen. We’ve reached a point where domestic life is shaped by the algorithms of platform visibility. Homes have become stages mediated by cameras and screens.
However, this has a long architectural trajectory; already in the 1950s, television began shifting how domestic space was used. As Lynn Spigel writes in Make Room for TV, families restructured their interiors to accommodate the screen. Living rooms, bedrooms, and even kitchens were reorganized. Television became the new center of the home, replacing the fireplace as the place families gathered around, from which global information would enter the local. In 1983, Ugo La Pietra’s Casa Telematica imagined a fully networked home where media systems were part of the architecture. Screens, cameras, and signals filled the space; design followed communication practices. That scenario feels familiar today. Our homes are full of devices. Screens are always on. Many people wake up and fall asleep in their glow.
Platformness becomes a kind of new urban condition, where online platforms serve as gathering spaces built on clickbait, attention economies, and endless scrolling. Twitch, TikTok, and YouTube transform everyday routines into content, sparking new domestic economies. Cooking, gaming, dressing, talking to yourself—anything can be streamed. Personal space becomes content space.
In our studio, we observed how online communities inhabit online spaces, like in Joe Hunting’s We Met in Virtual Reality, or Club Zodiac, which documents life inside VRChat. Joe beautifully showcases hidden online gatherings taking place in the virtual dimension, and the movies cut between the real and virtual lives of people, displaying how they make use of the virtual space as a socio-economic, sometimes intimate, sometimes emotional place. What’s missing in those worlds is physical space. That’s where our studio stepped in. Each student worked with both digital rituals and physical form, reimagining a case study house based on a specific online phenomenon they have deeply researched. Rather than treating screens as separate objects, we explored how space itself can function as an interface.
Departing with a research on the Radical Italian Designs of the 70s and the Austrian avant-garde vision of domestic design through mass media, over the one year studio, students have explored six different categories of online phenomena related to living/working at home through mediation of platforms and live streams—spanning from bathing to sleeping, from intimacy to gaming, from asmr to #hot, from eating in with strangers to fashion.
Each theme examines how the rituals of domestic life are being reshaped and repurposed within architectural settings, particularly as they become intertwined with the digital economies of social networks, livestreaming platforms, and spatial computing.
But when space becomes the new screen, when architecture itself turns into a media object, what does it mean to be always online or to have offline spaces? To have product placement in a portion of your home? And when eyes don’t just watch you but live with you, remotely, constantly, how do you move through a kitchen that doubles as a set? How do you behave in a bathroom that might be broadcast? What becomes of a bedroom where the line between resting and recording has thinned?
The studio rethinks these rituals, tracing how they shift from screen to space, and asks how architecture and interiors might respond when its blueprints are no longer fixed but updated in real-time by the logic of streams and the algorithms of visibility.
Our design-led research culminated in a series of 1:1 built XR installations. Each one is a fragment of domestic space expanded through collective digital overlays, stitched environments where the physical and the virtual coexist. These are prototypes of domesticity that showcase what happens when home is a shared interface, inhabited by strange collectives shaped around economy, social presence, and sometimes, intimate encounters.
We aim to expose the absurd and performative aspects of living at home within online contexts, not to adopt them as new ways of living, but to explore how the fusion of space and media creates something absurd, performative, and radical. And alongside this, how architecture might open space for alternatives that move beyond platform capitalism, imagining forms of domesticity grounded in smaller, stranger, and more mutual forms of digital life.
Supervisors: Anna Pompermaier, Cenk Güzelis
Students: Drewes Fabian, Falbesoner Wassilissa, Gazzola Luca, Gebel Roman, Haim Fabio, Lutz Andres, Mair Antonia, Müller Zoe, Murschetz Maxima, Persic Niko, Ringer Regina, Schlautmann Florian, Schulz Marc, Van Koll Marvin, Weiss Adrian
© Photos: Christoph Schwarz, Cenk Güzelis
1:1 XR INSTALLATION
>/some student projects…
The project began with an observation of how contemporary digital culture has redefined the domestic sphere. Once considered a site of privacy, the home has increasingly become a stage, a spatial extension of the online self. In this shift, activities once confined to the interior, such as eating, have taken on a performative dimension within virtual space. Platforms like YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Instagram and VRChat have transformed the everyday act of dining into a broadcast event, where meals become media and kitchens become studios.
Through this lens, the project positions itself as both an analysis and a design speculation. It traces the genealogy of the dining room and kitchen as social, technological, and representational constructs; from the rationalized workflows of Schütte-Lihotzky’s Frankfurt Kitchen to the ritualized disorder of the dinner table as seen in Sarah Wigglesworth’s drawings.
In doing so, it reveals how the architecture of domesticity has always mirrored wider cultural and economic systems, from industrial efficiency to post-industrial self-performance. If the twentieth-century kitchen was designed around the optimization of physical labour, so does the contemporary content-kitchen extend into digital labour, while combining its functions in a multipurpose, multidimensional spatial montage.
In this sense, All We Can Eat is a call for the architecture of tomorrow to tackle the increasing connection between even the most innocuous domestic activities and their mediality, as well as what the growing diffusion of broad societal symbols into a multiplicity of content-driven microcosms of meaning means for the private dwelling.
The speculative design developed here translates this condition into architecture. In the new environment, the domestic interior can be reconceived as a capsule environment: a utilitarian core stripped back to the most essential programs whose secondary, expressive functions extend into the digital.
Ultimately, the project is less a proposal for a single building than a reflection on an evolving typology: the mediated home. It interrogates how architecture might respond to modes of living that are no longer confined to material space, and how design can engage with the immaterial infrastructures that now shape the experience of domesticity.
CharacterCouture investigates the potential of digital fashion within domestic spaces, exploring how emerging Web3 designers create unique identities and interactions. By integrating digital garments, avatars, and spatial computing technologies, homes evolve into hybrid environments that seamlessly combine personal living, creative design processes, and performative events. These digital rituals challenge conventional notions of fashion production, public and private space, and architectural practice. This project highlights how working from home in the field of digital fashion becomes a social and interactive experience, reshaping domestic life. Architecture, thus, adapts to support these fluid, interactive spaces that offer both private intimacy and public visibility.
Introduction
As digital technologies reshape our everyday environments, the home—traditionally conceived as a space of privacy and retreat—undergoes a profound transformation. Livestreaming, social media, and virtual platforms increasingly draw domestic spaces into the public sphere. During the COVID-19 pandemic, digital work, social connection, and home life increasingly overlapped, leading to the emergence of hybrid domestic spaces.
Within these extreme transformations happening through the pandemic, digital fashion is gaining prominence in e-commerce, the gaming industry and social media. Almost every gaming platform is offering users the ability to dress and change their avatars, often in cooperation with brands.
Livestreaming platforms like Twitch have demonstrated how private interiors are becoming sites of affective labour and content creation, bringing the public into the former private home. At the same time, the immersive potential of virtual reality fosters frameless environments where interaction is no longer constrained by physical boundaries or architectural norms.
How can architecture respond to the new domestic practices created by the digital fashion community? As the boundary between the viewer and the viewed collapses, the domestic interior becomes an active participant in the performance of identity. CharacterCouture analyses how these new rituals challenge traditional spatial functions and how architectural design might evolve to support a life lived in the age of spatial computing.
Conclusion
Homes are no longer simply places we live in – they have become stages, studios, and screens. The arrival of television already changed the blueprint of the home fundamentally back then. Emerging technologies and social practices like streaming culture, virtual reality, and digital fashion are arriving now and we as architects must rethink our homes again by designing homes not only for living, but also for performing, sharing, and creating with others in real time.
Tingle Tower is an architectural exploration of domestic space at the intersection of physical and digital experience. Based on Takamitsu Azuma’s Tower House in Tokyo, the project reinterprets its vertical and introspective domesticity through the lens of ASMR, Japanese love hotels, online voyeurism, and mixed reality.
ASMR creates a form of digital intimacy through whispered voices, close-up gestures, and carefully staged soundscapes. This relationship between creator and viewer can move between care, relaxation, sensuality, and arousal. Similar forms of staged intimacy can be found in Japanese love hotels, where themed rooms create temporary micro-worlds for anonymous encounters, and in Big Sister, a former Prague club where physical intimacy was continuously recorded and streamed to an online audience.
These references form the conceptual basis for Tingle Tower: a digital swinger club in which physical and virtual environments overlap in real time. Each floor contains a different program that can be accessed both on-site and online. Visitors may be physically present, appear remotely through avatars, observe others, interact anonymously, or remain invisible. Variations in light, scale, sound, and materiality produce different atmospheres for conversation, relaxation, withdrawal, and intimate encounters.
The project questions the conventional separation between private and public space. Intimacy becomes simultaneously lived, performed, observed, and distributed through digital interfaces. The integration of advertisements and product placements further addresses how desire, sexuality, and attention are increasingly connected to commercial interests and platform economies.
Tingle Tower was developed as a virtual environment in VRChat and as a physical mixed-reality installation. A large sofa from the Bubble room functions as a tactile interface and shared social surface. During mixed-reality events, on-site participants and remote avatars occupy the same virtual environment, allowing physical bodies and digital identities to interact across different forms of presence.
Through this overlap, Tingle Tower tests architecture as a physical, virtual, sensory, and social medium. It asks how spaces of intimacy change when being present no longer necessarily means being physically visible, and when the private domestic interior becomes a shared and public stage.
tired together is a speculative design approach that reimagines the Suzuki House by BOLLES+WILSON as a case study through the lens of online communities such as ASMR streamers, sleep streamers, and people sleeping in VR. These online phenomena are connected through different forms of mediated intimacy.
Furthermore, tired together investigates how virtual spaces and their materialisation through spatial media may change domestic environments, and how domestic environments may, in turn, shape virtual spaces.
In its second part, the project communicates the central concepts of the resulting design through an exhibited 1:1 installation with a mixed-reality overlay.
/> Technology is changing and evolving at a rapid pace. With new technologies and forms of media, new virtual spaces have emerged. The question now is how these online phenomena, communities, and spaces reshape contemporary architecture and domestic environments.
Technological developments, especially in media, can change both our daily lives and the domestic architecture we inhabit. Lynn Spigel demonstrates this in “Make Room for TV” through the example of television. When television became widely available and entered millions of homes, living-room layouts began to change. The television replaced the fireplace as the main focal point. Seating, previously arranged to support conversation, was redirected to prioritise the view of the screen.
With large technology companies introducing products such as the Apple Vision Pro, Meta Quest, and Meta Glasses—all virtual-reality or mixed-reality consumer devices—to a broader market, spatial media appears to be the next step. But what does it mean for the way we live when large parts of the media we consume are no longer confined to the borders of a screen?
These new technologies can change the way we organise our domestic spaces. They also change the way money is earned. The term “attention economy” describes the effort to maximise a potential buyer’s attention to a product or service, treating attention as a limited resource. At the same time, data is becoming increasingly valuable, to the point that it functions as a new form of currency through which customers, often unknowingly, pay for services. These developments turn online personas of all kinds into profitable advertising machines.
As part of this shift, seemingly private domestic programmes, especially the bedroom, become public stages as inhabitants share or stream their lives online. Through the possibility of monetising this attention, the bedroom can change from a strictly domestic space into an income-generating workspace.
However, this may represent a change to the contemporary concept of the bedroom rather than an entirely new phenomenon. Historically, sharing a bed with friends, family members, or even fellow travellers was common. Royalty often slept alone or with a partner, although their bedrooms also had a representational function. King Louis XIV held official morning meetings in his bedroom, effectively ruling from his bed. A more recent example is Hugh Hefner, who was frequently photographed working in bed, further constructing his public image.
Some companies have already recognised this new reality of the bedroom and adapted their product ranges accordingly. Architecture, however, still lacks sufficient awareness of the growing importance and influence of virtual spaces on physical spaces and everyday life. For this reason, tired together researches and proposes a design situated within the overlap of virtual and physical space and life.
tired together spatialises Owen Hopkins’s idea that MEATSPACE—the physical, analogue space—overlaps with CYBERSPACE—the virtual, online space—and that this overlap forms a so-called MULTISPACE. Hopkins argues that as CYBERSPACE continues to extend, MULTISPACE also grows and gains significance, while MEATSPACE gradually disappears.
At first glance, this may seem like a futuristic or even dystopian view of the relationship between digital and analogue space. However, Hopkins argues that we already live primarily within MULTISPACE. Although the visual experience of CYBERSPACE is still largely confined to screens, trackers such as smartwatches, smartphones carried in our pockets, and digital surveillance technologies continuously collect data. This data transfers a version of ourselves into CYBERSPACE and consequently places us within MULTISPACE.
This concept is applied throughout the entire project, including its drawings and visualisations. MEATSPACE is depicted in green, MULTISPACE in black, and CYBERSPACE in pink.
reflection…
tired together takes the online serious. As a big and growing part of our daily lives and our interpersonal relationships. Therefore, it explores different forms of intimacy mediated through technologies and takes the corresponding online communities into account while reimagining the domestic environment of the Suzuki House.
tired together negotiates the theoretical concept of MULTISPACE within a speculative design and transforms it from the abstract into something tangible via its installation.
In the meantime, the design process of tired together builds on a constant back and forth between the icon of the Suzuki House and symbols of the virtual realm.
Through the work on tired together, for me it became increasingly clear that we already life in the MULTISPACE. In this day and age, screen times are rising, and people work, are entertained, socialize, and therefore life online.
It is out of the question that these digital spaces are created with ideologies and corporate interests in mind. I believe this designing role should be taken on by architects with the wellbeing of the users and society in mind, and not by tech companies looking for their next business opportunity.
Therefore, virtual spaces need a higher priority in architectural education as well as in the consciousness of practicing architects. This also bleeds into built, at first glance offline, architecture. Because architecture ignoring the virtual perspective cannot do justice to a society that is intertwined with the online in every aspect!
Introduction
In an age in which digital technologies are increasingly being integrated into everyday life, architectural demands on the topic of living are also changing. In today’s digital culture, people are sharing their lives on social media every day, some even 24/7. Much of this takes place in the domestic space of the streamer and is broadcast to the outside world via Twitch and other streaming platforms.
That led me think about how the home of a person is evolving in these times and how life is changing as it becomes increasingly controlled by the people who consume the content streamed from someone’s private space — when the life becomes a performative act.
The domestic space is increasingly becoming the stage for our digital presence, which is also changing its aesthetic and functional requirements to make it suitable for a digital reality. Today‘s architecture must respond to these cultural changes and allow for a reconception of the role of the home in terms of its identity and language.
Building on this research, I am designing a home for a streamer that already functions like an inhabitant scenography.
My design is based on The House of the Future by Alison and Peter Smithson, which is conceived as a scenography to show how life will change in the future. Building on this idea, I have developed a hyperbolic concept of the Case Study House.
The home is now occupied by a single live-in streamer who continuously broadcasts every moment of their life to an unlimited online audience. Viewers can tune in at any hour to observe daily routines that range from mundane to intimate.
Adding the audience’s ability to influence what happens, new emotional connections and dependencies begin to emerge between observer and observed.
The project raises the question of how the design of a home can support the production of content, but at the same time contribute to the dependency of the resident when their own living becomes a permanently transmitted performative act.
Reflection
Throughout my research and design process, I kept coming back to the question of how architecture changes when living space is no longer just a place to live, but also a stage.
The home is adapted to the specific needs of its inhabitants. Its architecture is transformed into a kind of playground that offers a multitude of possibilities. Furniture and rooms are defined by more than one function and take on additional roles as the physical environment is expanded by virtual layers. The feeling of being at home changes when that home is also a space shared with others and communicated via digital platforms. When we think of environments such as VRChawe see new possibilities for interaction and a sense of belonging that is not tied to physical space.
At the same time, I wanted to explore the other side of this development. While such architecture can give residents a sense of freedom to express themselves, it can also quickly become extreme when boundaries blur and viewers feel justified in influencing the streamer’s life. As content creators, people can feel pressured to meet expectations and constantly perform for an audience.
In any case, this is an architectural issue that deserves considerable attention. Living spaces are changing, especially when a commercial layer is added. Architecture must be adaptable to the evolving realities of its inhabitants.
My project imagines a living space designed as scenography, a laboratory to explore what happens when these phenomena collide. It is a place where life becomes a performance and the architecture itself becomes the medium of the spectacle.
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