Back to Bergen @PIKSEL2024

It feels like a perfect match when you think that everything is going well while you are decorating a gallery space in Bergen called “Alt Går Bra” – Norwegian for “everything is going well”. Revisiting Piksel Festival after 8 years luckily we have a bit more to show these days than just vague ideas: Now our utopia got a little handle! 😉

Thanks to Gisle, Maite and the Piksel Festival production team we have our own showroom where we can go completely bold presenting OHANDA ONE more realistic than ever.

Decorated with Tuomo’s amazing posters and scale models, we have a lot of curious visitors joining the opening presentation, where we give a little introduction to our project and the upcoming workshop during Piksel Festival 2024.

Together we imagine future possibilities and options, always brainstorming fantastic ideas, such as CAR-GO, where the batteries of electric cars power the cargo ship and trucks, while being shipped. 🙂 With a designer pro at hand, we (“Tuomo” [sic.]) update the projections straightaway …

As we brainstorm we parenthetically introduce a new numerical taxonomy for the various decks, starting from semi-submerged (default) waterline lower ones -1, -2, (and -3 – just in case) in the submerged hull, and upper ones 1, 2 and 3 (top deck), which also locates the sundeck with the heliport. We do agree that designations, color codes or animal pictures might be much easier to assign and to remember (and yes, for shipbuilding and marine structures there is ISO 5572:1987 — numbering of equipment and structural elements in ships), but hey just to not get stuck in pickiness or finding a consensus on those, we stick with our numbers for the nonce. Phew!

Now with the deck taxonomy at hand we can start to think about the interior design of the upper two passenger decks two and three hosting the refectories, assembly and workshop rooms, maker space, green house, media lab, cooking facilities, cabins etc. But before we start to arrange the rooms in the cardboard model, we run through intense interviews and conversations with participants and local politicians about the social life on board and the sense of it all.

One clear outcome of the conversations is that spatial flexibility is suggested in all directions. Since for example we imagine that cooking is a conducted shared event on board, it seems much better to have several cooking and eating facilities meeting the different needs and flavors instead of having one central canteen kitchen. Demand based adjusting and resizing of assembly and workshop rooms plus cabins – we assume there will be a flexible demand from various sizes of dormitories to single rooms depending on peoples preferences and the spatial conditions – is yet another interesting challenge to further think about.

Between the interviews we effectively make use of our time trying to figure out if the human waste of roughly 200 people including all kitchen and other organic waste on board might be sufficient to profitable run a bio gas plant from it worth the effort. From our first findings that would not even suffice to fully operate the kitchen stoves, but that will definitely need further investigation. For electricity, besides installing windmills and putting solar cells all over, combining fitness and workout exercise machines with current generators sounds like a very feasible proposition. We (“Julian” [sic.]) also start a general and long list of facilities, fixtures and fittings required for the ship, including sauna, fishing equipment, garbage compactor, sprinkler system, sea lab, sky observatory any many more.

Finally after 3 days of intense and inspiring conversations we capture the recent state of the OHANDA ONE project and present the latest iteration at Piksel Studio at the closing event on Saturday evening.

And before we all head back home, there is yet another perfect gap filling moment to play on for marketing!

Jürgen Neumann