Tele-Presence in Architecture

My Linked Research project is slowly progressing. I intend to exploit a predisposition of students to make marks on the world around them as a means to facilitate greater interaction between anonymous students. Part of the ritual of mark making is the place these signs are left. I am not aiming to develop an online message board that can be ignored or forgotten about. Instead I will seek to integrate with the physical place that students are already using as a canvas, asking the research question;

"How can telepresence and the act of mark making be used to link unfamiliar students of architecture together, and encourage meaningful interaction across the peer group?"

Setting out to investigate this, I have previously put forward three questions that I need to answer in the process of designing an installation. These were;

• How can I provide a window of time in which students will feel free to reflect on their work and progress?
• How can I encourage them to use their time for this end?
• What new knowledge can I impart to them in order they better understand the purpose of reflection as a practice?

There is a maxim that says “any task invariably enlarges itself to fill the time available in which to complete it”. I intend to provide a window for my reflective activity by integrating the publish, comment, feedback process into the current act of mark making. It is worth remember to consider the immediate nature of the marks that students are making, as the success of my proposal will probably rest in is instant availability and clarity.

Students will be encouraged to contribute by the social nature of the activity, and by the fact that the installation will integrate into the space occupied by their culture. Overtime the intention is the installation will be subsumed and appropriated into the studio culture in the same way that the walls have been already.

The final question is the hardest to answer, however I hope that by offering them the opportunity to reflect on their own work, individual students will be able to see value in the activity for themselves.

How mark making can be used to links students together is the design challenge that I have been and will continue to narrate on these pages.