Who are affected by Small Living spaces??

Generally, I think bigger families will be directly affected by the shrink in area of living spaces as we all need personal space to move about and carry out our personal and daily routines, thus by having a big family, like 5-6 people, living in a small area will turn out to be really cramp. For me, i am stepping into the shoe of a stakeholder who is a 45 year old man with middle-income and 4 kids , living with his parents. That makes up a total of 7 people living in a relatively average sized flat. The experience is tough as the kids needed money for school., i also imagined that my kids were NAFA students and that they all had to buy the expensive sets of Rotring technical pens. Thus, with such high expenses and an even higher property price in the current market, it is difficult for me to buy a bigger apartment to fit my entire family comfortably. Going deeper into brainstorming, I think Musicians and Artists may be affected as well due to their huge amount of equipment. Musicians may have multiple guitars or drumsets, or a huge grand piano, all these takes up considerable amount of space. Artists may have huge canvas paintings to store and tons of paint, brushes as well as other mediums of art that they use.

Extreme transformer home in Hong Kong: Gary Chang's 24 rooms in 1

Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated cities in the world and its severe shortage of land made living there relatively difficult. Most of the apartments there are really small and cramped up , families usually live in houses that are around 600 square foot. The YouTube video above which was shared by my group's leader , Krishna , showed an Architect named Gary Chang , turning his small little apartment ,which is just over 340 square foot in area , into a home full of hidden rooms. His method of movable walls using tracks installed on the ceilings is simple ,low-tech but yet very effective and the design is also very contemporary. This can be the future of maximizing space in micro-apartments and will be especially useful in other places such as Tokyo , London.

Design Process 3 ,Money.

In many big metropolitan cities around the globe , economy and lifestyle are very fast paced. Cities such as Paris , New York City , London , Tokyo and Singapore experiences an ever growing economy and time , is money.Standards of living in those cities are rather high because of their strong economies , and this will definitely affect the people living there in terms of purchasing what they want. Of course , by now most people would have already found out that Singapore was named the world's most expensive city to live in 2014 , a study result which includes 131 cites done by the Economist Intelligence Unit. Singapore topped the list because of its strong economy and currency , also the cost to run a car and soaring utility bills and not to forget , buy a house. It is also the most expensive place to buy clothes. With all these factors combined , a full-time working class adult needs to spend quite a lot of money in month.With money invested in everyday necessities like clothes , it is very difficult for a middle-income adult to actually own a big house in Singapore. This is made worse by the fact that Singapore faces land constraints and an increase in population. Nowadays , a brand new 3 bedroom condominium can set you back at around $900,000 - $1M+ . A condominium with the same size , or perhaps even slightly bigger in other countries such as United States of America (USA) , is probably going for half of that price.Given the same amount of income per year , I am sure that one could probably invest in a much larger home in places like Malaysia , Indonesia.  Therefore , a working class adult living in cities which has a very high standard of living , is going to face financial constraints when going for a home with a considerably large area.  

Bibliography!

All of us will not like the feeling of people using our works and not crediting them to us. Thus , it is very important that we make a note and credit the actual owner or creator of a particular information or work piece by doing a bibliography. Studying in a tertiary level , learning to write a bibliography is an important step towards working in the society when things can get very tense. It is necessary to include our references in our research and  so as to avoid plagiarism. In NAFA , we have the access to the NAFA Style Guide which guides us on how to write proper bibliographies depending on the resources that we have taken from , be it an online Encyclopedia , books , videos or podcast and many more different sources. These are the bibliographies that my group did for our Report , it is all based on the NAFA Style Guide.

Bibliography:

1 'Joint statement by fifty-eight of the world's scientific academies'. InterAcademies , Created 199. Accessed January 25th 2014.
<http://web.achive.org/web/20100210203604/http://www.interacademies.net/?id=2547>

2. Lim,W.S.W. , Cities for People: Reflections of a Southeast Asian Achitect. 1990 , Singapore: Select Books Pte Ltd.

3. Wassener , Bettina. 'Inside Hong Kong's incredibly cramped cubicle apartments'. The Sydney Morning Herald. Vol. 42 , Issue no. 2 , October 15th 2013 , Accessed Day January 26th , 2014.

4. Jacobson , Mark ,'Mumbai's Shadow City'. The National Geographic Magazine. Vol. 22 , May 2007 , Accessed day January 25th ,2014.

5. Conran , Terence. How to Live in Small Space. London : Conran ,2013.

6. Parikh , Anoop. Making the Most of Small Spaces. New York :Rizolli ,1994

Empathize

From a designer's point of view , having to empathize about the client's needs is a very essential skill. First of all , by putting one into the client's shoes trying to feel and experience things from his or her point of view can help us to understand what the client actually wants and thus , by understanding that , the designer can draft out his design which suits almost perfectly for the user. For example , lets just say that I am an Architect or Interior Designer. I have been given the task of having to build an Old Folks home , I will firstly consider what an old folk's essential needs , in this case , probably more elevators and more handle bars.  And then , I will go into more details , like for example , the design and the layout of toilets , it should not be too cramped up and must be equipped with handles for the old folks to hold on to , and what if some accident happened in the cubicle?? An alarm system may be installed in case of emergency , when the old folk accidentally slip and fall for example , they can press the alarm button that should be located at a convenient location. Therefore , by imagining myself as an old folk using all the facilities in the Old Folks home, I will know which are the areas that are most important and some of the very important support tools that should not be overlooked. Thus through this example , having empathy towards a client's or users' needs can significantly improve one's design and also greatly satisfy the client and user.  

Stakeholders.

After doing the mindmap and presenting it my own class 1F as well as 1D , we were told by our teachers that we need to find out who the stakeholders are in relation to our topic. So we came up with 3 stakeholders. A 45 year-old man with mid-income and is a father of 4 , a student and a 30 year-old bachelor. As for me , I am given the role of the 45-year old man and we were suppose to express our thoughts and feelings about stepping into this person's shoe.
Being a father of 4 , the expenses is going to be really high , i thought that if my children were arts students , the material costs is going to be so high , for example Copic markers and Rotring technical pens , and i would have to give them sufficient amount of money for their studies. Not to forget daily necessities too such as food  and water. I am also living in a relatively small flat with my parents , I can sense how cramp the living space will be having 8 people cramped up in a limited area of personal space.

Design Process 2.

In the previous post , my group and I discussed about Overpopulation and Land Shortage as two of the main issues that led to living space getting smaller and smaller. Now we will talk about the money factor. Money , which is a very important resource perhaps the most important thing anybody could possibly have.
Buy a living space for your own personal or social needs obviously requires money and what happens when property prices in some cities or countries , like Hong Kong, Singapore, Monaco are sky-high?? The result , a small apartment.

Take Hong Kong for example , its property prices are the world's highest in a Savills survey of ten cities including the likes of New York , London and Tokyo. And with the gap between top-end markets and cheaper ones are getting narrowing , thus resulting in an overall increase in property prices. For example , Residential buildings stand in the Mid-levels of Hong Kong , a 1000- square foot apartment would cost about HK$15.9 million on average. ( Source : bloomburg.com)

Residential building in Hong Kong.

In conclusion , if the price of an apartment per square foot is too high for a mid-income working adult to afford, then , the only thing they could possibly do is to buy and move in a small area of living space as we all need a shelter above our heads.