Space and Place

Whilst browsing through the Space and Place listserv archives, which I finally managed to sign up to (to some degree anyway), I found the Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action & Research, or Pukar. 

Most engaging was the Gender and Space project, which has an interesting Ethnographic study conducted in railway stations. They also present how their research led to public interventions, specifically the Railway Lighting Campaign.

The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces

Found this short clip from William H. Whyte's "The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces". It's has some really interesting observations of human behaviour, but sadly this is the only clip available. Chris said that the book of the same title is definitely worth a read as well.

Focus, focus, focus

At the moment all I can think of is words...

urban, space, design, society, people, city, sound, media, social, interaction, art, environment, globalisation, culture, architecture, existence, mobile, connections, communication, place, community, technology, context, flow, simplicity, complexity...

I'm struggling to find the focus for my project, everything I look at interests me and sends me off in another direction. I know I need to narrow down, otherwise I will be going round this loop forever. I feel like I need to grab hold of one bit of inspiration. I found this image here from Robin Howie, which I feel captures some of what I'm thinking about. A Dialogue with Public Space "transforms the public landscape into a conversation."

Via Picacool

Any ideas or suggestions from anyone on how to find focus on the project would be much appreciated. I'm sure I'll get there, I just hope that it's soon.

Public Space

After doing a bit of initial research into how people might communicate in public space I decided to look a bit further into concepts of space. Something which came up in the discussions was how people interact and move through certain spaces. I stumbled upon this video of a scramble intersection via Picocool, which I love. It's the sort of thing I can just sit and watch, and observe the flux of people's movement. 

I also got talking to my Dad about the area of my project, and as he works as an architect he had some really useful points and has recommended some things for me to look at. He talked about his own desire to design for spaces. Rather than worry about how a building looks on the outside, he wants to create spaces that are meaningful and useful for people. He talked about visiting the Neue Wache in Berlin, designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, and how people behaved when they entered the room with the Käthe Kollwitz sculpture. He said that people didn't just walk straight in and head towards the centre, but would move slowly and quietly around the edge by the walls.

Mother with her Dead Son, sculpture in the Neue Wache

Space and Place

I've been doing a bit more research in relation to the DE project, which we'll hopefully be finding out more about next week. I've tried to divide my research into three main areas:

• People (and their behaviour)
• The space and it's environment 
• The object or interactive system involved.

I found this paper, which deals with social interactions in public spaces. It was geared towards researching possible frameworks for mobile information systems. I like how they have structured their research and hopefully I can take some of this into how we manage our task as a group.

Whilst thinking about people's behaviour in space I remembered a blog entry I came across last year on desire paths. I always find these desire paths captivating, it helped me realised how people will make a space work for them, even if the design of it impedes them. It's visual evidence of where a designer has "imposed their own will onto the site, as opposed to finding a solution that accounts for the wants and “desires” of the users." I think it will be interesting to also look into urban, environmental and architectural design in relation to the project.

Desire Path - Flickr

In relation to objects and interactive systems, I am often drawn back to my roots in interaction design. I find it hard to get away from looking at big interactive systems like display screens and a lot of the examples on Interactive Architecture. I do like a lot of this stuff, although sometimes I feel these interactive pieces can verge too much on the art side of things and fail to acknowledge an actual requirement.

I did find this blog Interactive Displays in Public Spaces, which had some interesting insights, particularly in regards to zones and behaviours around the displays. There's a link to a good write-up on SlideShare, with some useful diagrams.

Diagram of interactive display in public space

People in Space

Whilst in London I was attempting to observe things in relation to the group project we have been set in DE. The full brief has not yet been handed out, however we were told that it will involve people, and how they collaborate in space, particularly with big interactive systems. I tried concentrating on watching how people behaved in public spaces, and how they dealt with systems such as ATMs and ticket kiosks. It was also interesting to see people interacting with other information devices such as maps and some of the exhibits in the Science Museum. I found that in different situations behaviour became quite similar, especially when it came to queueing for things.

People interacting at the Science Museum

Often I found myself reminded of Jane Fulton Suri's book Thoughtless Acts? It illustrates how "we adapt, exploit, and react to things in our environment; things we do without really thinking." I kept finding examples in London such as an empty coffee cup left on a ledge at a tube station, someone sitting on the steps at a statue, and people keeping behind the yellow line at an ATM.

Thoughtless Acts

Jane Fulton Suri is involved in the human factors section at IDEO. Last year I read the article Informing Our Intuition, which I found related to me and my desire to understand people in order to create intuitive design. It was also interesting to read her describe the need for design research to be "integral to the innovation process, rather than as an external activity."

I actually saw another book along a similar theme in the Design Museum called Design by Use: The Everyday Metamorphosis of Things, which sadly doesn't appear to be in the library here.