Janice Lo

Janice is an artist and architectural designer whose work explores a wide variety of contemporary topics with a particular focus on regenerative design and material innovation. Having graduated from Central Saint Martins, UAL, with first-class honours in BA Architecture, Janice joined the Urban Design team at HawkinsBrown in London and worked on a variety of urban design and master-planning projects in the UK, where she was keen to explore the importance of spatial design and how it can influence the social, economic and environmental aspects of a community.

Janice believes that good architectural designs and master-planning stem from the thorough understanding and analysis of an area’s character, and social, cultural and economic factors. She understands that there is a pressing need for an innovative approach, for example by employing the concepts of regenerative design and circular economy in a wider context, in order to face today’s challenges. Her strengths lie in her ability to clearly identify existing problems and opportunities within a complex context and developing responsive strategies which address these issues.

During her first year at the RCA, Janice continued her interest in material exploration by designing an urban park in Macau, her home city, which is low in both embodied and operational carbon through the use of pre-tensioned stone and windcatchers. In her second year with ADS4, Janice explores the social and psychological implications in a future where everything in the world is digitally twinned, drawing from her own experience and background as an identical twin herself.

The Uncanny Twin

With the emergence of the digital and virtual worlds acting as a twin for the real world, what are the implications for our relationship with contemporary challenges?  

The Uncanny Twin explores the concepts of twinning and the uncanny valley at a time when the world is facing numerous contemporary challenges we can no longer afford to ignore. The project explores a scenario in which in the near future, everything in this world has a digital twin of their own. It is a speculative project, a piece of communication to talk about a technology that is on the horizon and its applications as well as its implications in the future.

Using film and the characters Janice and Ecinaj as a methodology to test the emerging relationship dynamics between different types of twins and our emotional responses towards encountering and interacting with them, the project begins to question and unpack the cultural, social and psychological implications of the emergence of this technology on the wider society and our built environment.

Digital twin technology can provide us the opportunity to quickly accelerate time to learn things about ourselves that we wouldn’t otherwise have known. The accelerated simulation shows what Ecinaj will look like in 10 years time based on Janice's current health data, genetics and lifestyle choices. The result from the simulation is so horrifying that it coerces Janice to start making changes to her current lifestyle. The same speculative simulation is applied to the Dumont building in London, showing the horrendous state of the building in 10 years time unless drastic changes are made. The residents of the building come together to propose a retrofit design.