Communal Cycle Hotel
I worked on this project while interning at Oslo design office K8 Industridesign. This project became K8’s submission to a competition to create three new bicycle hotels for three different locations around Oslo.
K8 was the only design office in the competition, alongside approximately 35 other architecture offices. Our approach was to design the hotels as more of a service, instead of as a piece of architecture. We used methods such as user interviews and service journey mapping to understand the user’s needs, and how our service might meet those needs.
The project received an Honourable Mention, one of six submissions to receive a prize. The project gave K8 experience in merging design with architecture, and also raised the company’s profile to the municipality as a possible future collaborator.
Project by: Nikolai Øvrebekk and Jacob Pettersen
Project length: 6 weeks
Where: K8 industridesign
When: Spring, 2017
Responsibility
I did the project together with Nikolai Øvrebekk, another intern at K8 at the time. I was the project leader, however we worked on all of the elements of the project together, from user testing, service ideation, Solidworks constructing and rendering.
In this photo, we are working on the wall construction of the hotels, taking inspiration from the strength principles of bicycles.
Interviews in existing bicycle hotels
We did user interviews in three different existing cycle hotels, asking users what worked for them and what could be improved.
We found that the physical infrastructure of the hotel buildings worked fine, but that the communication touchpoints, from hearing about the service to getting in and out of the building, was poorly designed.
Concept / service plan
In our service and building blueprint, we illustrated the different elements that each hotel should contain and what activities could be done to make the hotel not just a parking lot but a centre for cycle events in the local community.
Site 1
This is the rendering and drawings for one of the locations, a subway tunnel in a suburb of Oslo called Grorud. One of the competition guidelines was that the walls should be see-through, in order to prevent people from stealing bikes inside the hotel. We addressed this requirement by making the walls out of perforated metal plates framed by diagonal wooden beams to mimic the diagonal lines in a bicycle frame and to make the wall more interesting and dynamic in a perspective view.
Site 2
We used colour to indicate the assigned areas for different types of bicycles; cargo bikes were allocated more space, while electrical bikes were provided charging facilities.
Site 3
The biggest site was in a west suburb of Oslo. Here, we made it possible for the roof of the hotel to be used as well, as a place to stay while waiting for the bus or subway. All the hotels are located by a important subway station in the suburbs of Oslo to make it more attractive to bike to the subway instead of driving a car.
Recognition
The CEO of K8 Industridesign and Nikolai received the Honourable Mention prize. I wasn’t there to receive it because I was on a cycle holiday in Russia at that time. It was a tough project because we had never done architecture before, but we learned a lot!