The exhibition "Design Thinking: Public Awareness About The Importance Of Utilitarian Design" is created by Albert Guillaumes Marcer and presented as part of Romanian Design Week with the support of the Spanish Embassy in Bucharest.
Utilitarian design, rooted in the philosophy of “the greatest good for the greatest number of people,” has played a crucial role in shaping the functional and aesthetic aspects of our daily lives and European cities.
As an example, the design of metro stations, integrated into the design of the entire network, has to balance urban aesthetics and easy and efficient functionality. A well-designed metro system contributes to improved quality of life by reducing commuting stress, noise pollution and traffic accidents.
The exhibition presents a series of plans of metro stations and interchanges in Bucharest next to those of the Madrid Metro, to establish a connection between the two cities. Between the 2D models, 3D printed models of Bucharest and Madrid metro stations will hung, creating an installation that allows the public to understand the complexity of these objectives.
The plans are made by the public works engineer Albert Guillaumes Marcer, author of more than 1700 metro station plans from all over the world.
Albert Guillaumes Marcer (Sant Pere de Ribes, 1993) is a Technical Engineer of Public Works. He works in the General Directorate of Transport and Mobility of the Generalitat de Catalunya, dedicated to the management of intercity buses. He has been a fan of public transport since he was a child.
His project was born approximately in 2011, when he began a reflection on the efficient design of Metro stations and interchanges, when he realized that in Barcelona, his hometown, to make a transfer it is necessary to travel long corridors, sometimes more than 100 meters long. The author began sketching subway stations in various cities in a notebook to see if the topology was efficiently designed compared to Barcelona. In 2020 he began to make computer perspectives of the interchanges, as an idea to overcome the confinement, inspired by the three-dimensional plans available to the public, as orientation elements, existing in the subway networks of Japan. The objective has varied over time: at first it consisted only of drawing correspondence stations wherever they were; nowadays the objective is to draw all the subway stations in Europe.
The drawing process begins in situ at the station, where he draws a sketch of all the public elements: accesses, lobbies, stairs, elevators, corridors and platforms; noting the shape and sometimes the size of the elements, taken by eye. He also takes the opportunity to take photos.
A few days later, he digitizes the station floor plan. Two products come out of the plan: on the one hand, perspective drawings of the stations, after applying transformations to the elements of the plan from the same program; and, on the other hand, the 3D models.
Raising public awareness of the importance of design in public transport is to encourage the participation of citizens in the construction of new, sustainable and intelligent cities.
The exhibition "Design Thinking: Public Awareness About The Importance Of Utilitarian Design" is part of RDW Design Flags.