Dissolve everyday life's conflicts to let its beauty present

When designers work on everyday life, they relinquish single-centered decision-making and concern above varieties of life. However, pluralist life forms naturally mean more conflicts and contentions due to divided interests and private goals. The central problem is how to deal with the additional conflicts in order to reveal the richness in the plurality of lives.

The uniqueness of everyday life lies in this complexity that exceeds attention and goes beyond recognition. Everyday life has a substrate that is absent and filtered out on the top of society, wherein one sees only unambiguous conflicts or consensus. George Perec coined the term "infra-ordinary" to describe the excessive complexity of everyday life: "everydayness ... requires a kind of quixotic or excessive attention ... what is continually missed when traditional notions of significance are applied ... only to suggest that these are already too significant." George Perce directed attention towards "describing what remains: that which we generally don't notice, which doesn't call attention to itself, which is of no importance; what happens when nothing happens, what passes when nothing passes, except time, people, cars, and clouds." Working on everyday life is to attend to that which exceeds attention, unleashing the unspoken potentials in ordinary environments. This returns to what I call the aesthetic approach of architects' engaging with society. I think in this way designers could dissolve and soften conflicts in everyday life because they diffuse and dilute attention previously concentrated on the points of contentions. 

The precondition for realizing the above is that users must have extra attention beyond everyday life necessity. One should not be occupied with exigencies of daily life and should avail some superfluous attention at designers' disposal. However, I find that housing projects are so much about urgent daily needs and basic life requirements, to the degree that maybe it is not the best architectural typology to exercise designers' engagement with everyday life. 

In the informal and illegal spatial occupations shown in today's class, I see the coexistence of both ineffable conflicts and beauty, perhaps more conflicts than beauty. Instead, I find William Whyte's The Social Life of Small Urban Places serves as a better example. Additional possibilities are offered for the places people simply pass by in their everyday life and have nothing to pay attention to.

housing design as a way to structure the ordinary: 

can we find something more meaningful than privatizing space?

the plaza mentioned in The Social Life of Small Urban Places