The Medium is the Message

Marshall McLuhan - The Medium is the Massage

I found this book again whilst I was in Edinburgh doing a more extended period of observation at Waverly. Not too sure where this idea is going, but maybe just something to mull over for a while.

"All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered."

Personal Space

So I've been doing my first round of analysis and some codes/themes have been emerging. One of these was personal space, and particularly how the environment and the individual's actions affects this.

Coincidentally I came across this post by Alan Rapp on the Design Observer blog. It mentions Robert Sommer so I think I will take a look into his book Personal Space: The behavioral basis of design. I've also started finding a few articles on how things such as listening to music can alter people's perception and awareness of the space around them.

Primary Observation

Last week I was down in London beginning my observational fieldwork at St Pancras Station. I was able to spend a couple of days in the space, and get a feeling of how people were acting in the environment. I was most aware of the amount of people still working/communicating whilst on the move. These "mobile workers" came in various forms, from the businessman/woman working on a laptop at any opportunity to someone simply on talking/texting on their mobile phone whilst on the move. It was just something that stood out to me, and something to consider during my analysis. It was also intriguing to see how people adapted the space and objects within the space to suit their needs.

My next step will be to do an initial round of analysis/synthesis to see what stands out.

Landworkers

I attended the Landworkers Symposium, held as part of the RIAS Convention, at the DCA last Thursday. It presented a series of collaborative projects where the land itself was considered the medium.

I found the first presentation by Gavin Renwick particularly engaging. He showed his work in the Canadian Northwest Territories, and how he had spent time with the local people, and thus built up an understanding of their culture. An interesting insight was the Inuit relation to space. For example he stated that they have no words for inside or outside, as you are always home, as the land is your home.

In a similar vein, the second presentation from Juhani Pallasmaa included two examples of projects he has been involved in. The first was the design of the Siida museum for Sámi culture and the nature of Northern Lapland. The main exhibition in the museum had been spatially organised, where every space had meaning relating to the seasons and work cycle of the Sámi people. The second project was a monument design for a T-junction in Detroit at Cranbrook Acadmey, which they wanted transformed into a feature. The final solution was again rooted within context, with local glacier rock used as the main material, and Juhani described this as a collaboration between architecture and nature and history.

Siida Museum interior

I was lucky enough to meet Juhani the day before the symposium, and this idea of collaboration came up then as well. He talked about collaboration not just being between a designer and users, or a designer and experts, but collaboration should also be with tradition and history, and what has been done before. He also pointed me in the way of some more literature that I might find interesting, mainly in regards to human behaviour and architectural history.

The most significant points that I will take with me from these two days are the concept of collaboration being with everyone, from the people you are designing for, to the client, to the past and all the other people that may be affected. Also empathy for everyone is important, as by understanding how others think it will be easier to interpret their motives and needs.

Research Proposal Presentation

Today we presented our research project proposal, as if pitching for funding from the Research Councils UK for their proposed research programme on "Connected Communities".

As a team were very happy with our proposal, and I think this aided us in the presentation. All four of us believed in and had confidence in our concept, and were comfortable with pitching the idea. I hope that we managed to sell the idea as well as we could. We have all been thinking about the project for a while now, and so the most important factor will be if we have managed to succeed in communicating our thoughts to other people.

In conclusion, after this project I feel that I have a much better sense of how I would go about planning a proposal for a research project in a real situation. At the start of this module it's fair to say that I wouldn't have a clue how to even begin thinking about costing a 3 year research project, however now I hope I could get somewhere close.

In a general sense I hope I can take some of what I have learned and I apply it in my own work. As Tom said, it is the theory behind what we have learned that we will be able to apply. It doesn't matter what the subject matter of the project is, but it is the design methods and approaches that we have learned that will be applicable across many realms.

K.N.I.T.

Our group has finally come up with the name for our project proposal. It is Kommunity Networking for Information Transfer, or the acronym KNIT, and the tag-line is "weaving the community together". It arose from a discussion about how to incorporate all of our ideas, and we felt it encompassed our concept as a whole quite well.

As it is an important factor of how we would brand and advertise the project Grace has also worked on a logo, which encapsulates the concept quite well. We have done some work on branding previously but I feel in this particular project the branding of it would be quite significant. If the project was not branded correctly then it would be very difficult to get support from local people and businesses. It would have to be able to cross a wide range of stakeholders and incorporate both new and old associations with Dundee.

Urban Computing

Whilst doing a bit of browsing for ideas on my 3rd Semester Project I found this PDF called Sliding Friction: The Harmonious Jungle of Contemporary Cities. It really relates to the Urban Traces project we worked on.

It's been written by two of the contributors to Liftlab, Nicolas Nova and Fabien Girardin, who are both "designers methodically searching for processes and interaction within the urban environment". They both look at how understanding people could help in the design of future technology, particularly this notion of urban/ubiquitous computing.

On Girardin's blog I found this old post on Mapping Urban Computing. It depicts the image below, which was created by Karen Martin. I could really relate to the image, and saw how my own interests fall into this diagram. I wonder how I can make sense of it all, and find out how I can tie everything I'm interested in into a project.

I realised that Karen Martin had worked with Giles Lane in the past. Giles had come to IMD during my 3rd year, I think, to talk about his work with Proboscis.

I did a bit more digging around on Urban Computing, and found this article on Bruce Sterling's blog, where he mentions The Situated Technologies Pamphlet Series that "explores the implications of ubiquitous computing for architecture and urbanism: How are our experiences of the city and the choices we make in it affected by mobile communications, pervasive media, ambient informatics, and other “situated” technologies?"

You can download the PDF from the The Architectural League NY's website.