DTS Design Center

interactive design hub for scholars, students, & design professionals

DTS Design Center, 2021

The 21st century feels the increasing dominance of a "Sharing Economy", which is slowly dominating lifestyles via widespread use of the Internet, through hotels without their own facilities, fleets without cars, cinemas without theaters and many similar examples. This new model, in which we share space and property through our screens, envisions the economy's transition from a static and centripetal structure to a distributed and fragmented one according to economist Jeremy Rifkin, who defines it as the "Third Industrial Revolution". Since the last quarter of 2019, the Covid-19 Pandemic accelerated and extended the transition process that Rifkin pointed out over the fields of work and education.

This important change in the way we perform has an undeniable effect on the way we make sense of space. The "single-function and low-performance" space concept normed by the Second Industrial Revolution is losing its traditional power and meaning in this new era, where we can work at home and hold conferences at our workplaces, listen to lectures on the street and attend concerts in our own kitchen. Examining the new spatial expansions brought by online experiences is thus of great importance, especially in public education and research structures, both in terms of setting an example and using allocated budgets effectively.

DTS Design Center, whose design process started in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, comes to life at the end of a design process in which education and research spaces are questioned through this new paradigm. The building aims to constitute an interaction center for both the campus and the region in addition to its education and office functions. In this respect, the design questions the spatial counterparts of our new learning and production styles with different strategies.