No abstract

COVID-19 forced billions of people to restructure their daily lives and social habits. Several research projects have focused on social impacts, approaching the phenomenon on the basis of different issues and scales. This work studies the changes in social relations within the well-defined urban-territorial elements of co-housing communities. The peculiarity of this research lies in the essence of these communities, which base their existence on the spirit of sharing spaces and activities. As social distancing represented the only effective way to control the outbreak, the research studied how the rules of social distancing impacted these communities. For this reason, a questionnaire was sent to 60 communities asking them to highlight the changes that the emergency imposed on the members in their daily life and in the organization of common activities and spaces. A total of 147 responses were received and some relevant design considerations emerged: (1) the importance of feeling part of a “safe” community, with members who were known and deemed reliable, when facing a health emergency; and (2) the importance of open spaces to carry out shared activities. Overall, living in co-housing communities was evaluated as an “extremely positive circumstance” despite the fact that the emergency worsened socialization.

The construction sector, by direct or indirect actions, consumes more than 40% of the global energy produced and is responsible for 30% of CO2 emissions. It is a need of the construction industry to transform its practices and processes by proposing systems of lower demand to the environment. In this sense, closed prefabrication and industrialization as a constructive process could be the key to seek savings and efficiency from its origin to the end of life of buildings. In this context, this article presents a methodological proposal of quantitative, qualitative and comparative analysis of the structural systems of eight prototypes presented in the “Solar Decathlon” contest in its North-American and Latin-American editions (both of them in 2015) and the European edition (in 2014). This methodology deduces the characteristics of a structural system of lower environmental demand and the characteristics of these constructive processes, in favor of a new paradigm of sustainability and to be applied in innovative systems of new housing models.

The construction industry is responsible for a high percentage of the energy consumed on the planet and the emission of greenhouse gases, therefore it is considered necessary to rethink many of the processes that this industry carries out in order to reduce its environmental impact. For this, one of the paths could take into account the Life Cycle Assessment of the used materials, for which it is necessary to evaluate this aspect through indicators that allow the qualification and quantification of the weight of these environmental impacts. In this context, this article presents a methodological proposal for the quantitative evaluation of the embodied primary energy and CO2 production at each stage of the life cycle of prefabricated structural systems, taking as case studies eight prototypes from the “Solar Decathlon” competition in its editions of Europe (2014), United States (2015) and Latin America (2015), through a Simplified Life Cycle Analysis, using the Eco Audit tool from CES Edupack. Through this analysis, conclusions are drawn about the optimization of a structural system with lower environmental demand and the possibilities of transferring knowledge from this competition to be applied in innovative systems of new housing models.

Playlab, an educational initiative of the School of Architecture, Art and Design of the Tecnologico de Monterrey University, provides a steady academic base for innovation in product co-design adapting to changing social and cultural contexts. Play Lab aims to bring students from different disciplines together to tackle social challenges within a specific local community as a platform for social innovation and moving beyond the classroom into an established social community. The professors deploy a wide arrange of participatory and ethnographic tools from which students choose and implement in the specific community context. Thus, the students have to go through a full and profound social and urban research of the chosen context before deciding on a viable collaboration design. Play Lab has had three iterations with different students in 2016, 2017 and 2018. This paper hopes to compile, compare and explain the processes and results of Play Lab while analysing some variables as a reference. Using a methodology proposed by Hansson et al. (2011) we performed an evaluation of the aforementioned iterations. We believe we have gained clarity regarding future strategies, methods and tools to be further used in Play Lab, our academic alternative for social innovation.