What_if_Dublin is a Twitter-based web platform that invites the public to participate in a debate on Dublin City. We founded this project with a small collective of young architects, designers and urban researchers as an initiative to encourage people to engage with the future of the city. Our work has lead to several collaborations with other community activists and has now developed into an active web platform and a weekly feature in Totally Dublin Magazine. We also formed part of the advisory committee in Dublin’s bid to be European Capital of Culture 2020.

The featured images show one of our projects in collaboration with the Irish Architecture Foundation (IAF), in which we participated in the St. Patrick’s Festival, constructing a series of installations around the city to super-impose our digital proposals onto their physical counterparts. 

Five installations were strategically placed throughout the city centre. Passers-by engaged with the steel benches, triggering their imagination and encouraging a rethinking of the possibilities of public spaces. These mild steel benches were constructed using layers of 6mm steel. Images were printed on transparency and positioned between layers of 10mm acrylic,  juxtapositioning the reality with the imagined.