Archipelago IX
Emeline Lex
Emeline Lex is a Stockholm-based urban planner and architect with 7+ years of experience shaping master plans and public spaces in Sweden and abroad. At Mandaworks, where she works now, she has contributed to award-winning international competitions and commissions and has led projects from concept to approval phases. With a background spanning Canada and Sweden, she brings a cross-cultural design perspective with interests in place-based storytelling and narrative mapping, landscape-driven urban design, geospatial mapping and circular design. She was awarded Special Mention for her proposal Re:mediate in Borås, Sweden in the Europan 15 Productive Cities competition. In her free time, she spends her days out in Swedish nature; hiking, camping, cross country skiing, and foraging. She has visited 23 out of Sweden’s 31 national parks. She holds a Bachelor in Urban and Regional Planning from Toronto Metropolitan University and a Master of Science in Architecture with a specialisation in Sustainable Urban Design from Lund University.
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Elina Lex, based in Montréal, is a media artist and cultural technologist. Working at the intersection of extended reality (XR), spatial storytelling, participatory design, and social innovation, she explores how immersive media can foster forms of placemaking, community engagement, and cultural storytelling. Her work has bridged disciplines, including environmental communication, immersive documentary, critical heritage, and sensory anthropology. Her projects have been exhibited internationally including the Geary Art Crawl, The Artist Project, and SONA Immersive Storytelling Festival, where she received the Sustainability Award. She has also served as a Student Competition juror for the Games for Change Festival. She holds a Master’s in Cinema and Media Studies from York University and a PhD in Communication Studies from Concordia University where her research was based at the Immersive Storytelling Studio at the Milieux Institute.
Archipelago IX is a concept for an immersive platform designed for urban designers, architects, and spatial practitioners to foster imagination, systems thinking, and collaborative design through immersive play. Using mixed and virtual reality technologies, the application will explore play, speculation, and co-design to help architects and spatial practitioners think more freely and design more intentionally. We explore the archipelago as a frame for reimagination and an opening for the possibility for seeing things differently. Inspired by philosopher Édouard Glissant's notion of archipelagic thinking and game theorist Alenda Chang’s concept of the mesocosm, we approach the immersive experience as an archipelagic system of immersive islands that act as ‘living laboratories’ for participants to test ideas, observe ecological and social relationships, and explore spatial consequences through immersive play. Within these island mesocosms, users are encouraged to experiment, take risks, and discover connections that might remain invisible in conventional design processes.
The context of the Stockholm archipelago began our research inquiry, becoming simultaneously a place, a metaphor, and an immersive design mechanic for imagining the world through diversity and plurality. Within the archipelagic constellation, multiple agents, human and non-human, become involved with the potential to inspire innovative ideation and defamiliarized ways of seeing, thinking, and responding to complex global challenges. This proposal emerged from a desire to discover connections between our disciplines and to expand the ways designers might navigate confined frameworks and processes in their day to day work. We combine expertise in urban design and planning, architecture, participatory spatial practice, and digital immersive media design to create new collaborative frameworks for spatial practitioners to navigate design complexities through emergent forms of interaction and play.