The Best Laid Plans...

OK, so I haven't built my tables. I have all of the materials, I have the templates drawn, just haven't made it that far. Fortunately, also haven't had meeting to discuss deployment yet, so I have another week. This is the exploded Axo. of what I WILL be building this week.

PK

Draft Research Question: ourParkour

Kevin Lynch defines an environmental image as a bidirectional and iterative process between the built environment and those using it; whereby ‘public images’ are the “common mental pictures carried by large numbers of a city’s inhabitants”. By documenting the movements of Traceurs and drawing upon other spatial and environmental theories, this project aims to investigate their sensory experience of space and analyse it against Lynch’s definition of the general public’s environmental image.

Jennie

Draft Research Question

With the evolution of internet shopping the high street is beginning to change. The act of purchasing goods is being removed from the physical environment, but what else does the high street provide? Autonomous agents are being developed to aid the shopping experience, primarily focused on making it easier to consume. Can an autonomous agent reflect the realistic challenges and provoke similar emotions that the high-street incites?

Balancing at Sandgate

Balancing at Sandgate from Jennie Webb on Vimeo.

Just a quick example of one of the videos I shot last weekend.

Definition of a Research Artefact

Research Artefacts as visualisation

A Research Artefact is an object that serves as a physical (and tangible) visualisation of a set of data values (researcher’s ideas, knowledge, information on a subject, wants etc…) that are personal to the researcher. It visualises a data set of the researcher in a form that is meaning full to them and can be categorised into three types.

Type One: An object that serves as a reminder to pursue and idea, find out more about something.

Type Two: An object that represents the process of an idea as we develop more about it.

Type Three: A representation of something achieved – the end of an idea.

Researchers fill there rooms with these artefacts and the location is not necessarily static. The location of the artefact is important and plays a fundamental part in creating the visualisation of the artefact to the researcher.

Examples of artefacts as visualisation

Researcher A(1) places a temperature sensor in his room. He puts it in his keyboard on his desk to remind him to look and find out how to use it better. In this scenario, the data is participant A wanting to find out more on how to use the temperature sensor and the visualisation is the sensor (as a physical object, not it functioning) and its location in his research space. The artefact is of type one and is providing an indexical representation to the researcher.

Researcher B’s (1) books are placed under categories that form the creation of a book proposal that he is developing. The data is that he wants to read a book called x because of y and the visualisation of this is the post-it notes and physical forms that sit in piles. This artefact is of type 2 and is again is an indexical representation to the researcher.

Objects serving as research artefacts do not usually represent all of the types presented above but, in rare cases they can do. Take for example a book. Looking at the physical object of the book, not the information inside it (the words) it can be a research artefact for all of the three type catagories presented above. In the context of type one, it could represent an artefact as the book object just being in our presence serves as a prompt to read it. In the context of type two, the book object could represent an idea that a researcher is perusing. Finally, in the context of type three, it could represent a project written up and published.

Primer focus

The type of artefact that I am choosing to focus on in my Primer project is Type one through developing symbolic representations. I am interested in looking at a research artefact as a representation of more than one thing, a representation in relation to a series of things.

My next step is to decide what the appropriate mapping would be that I would apply to the research artefact that I am creating. I would like to see this research artefact as an extension of the spatial probes that I have been developing in my linked research project in a sense that the software/artefacts that I create could be used as probes to deploy to the researchers that I have contact with.

Hypothesis:

Abstraction of visualisation is something that is representational only when the methodology is organised and conceptualised by the user. Fundamentally choice and customisation play an important role. I think that I will find that the tool used to create research artefacts may offer an appropriate visualisation for some people but not all. This is down to not everyone being able to relate to everything.

1. Smith.M. The Researchers Archive, Linked Research Project. 2011

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.

Autoethnography Hurts!

After interviewing my Traceur volunteers and then videoing/capturing their movements last Saturday, I was then (quite easily) persuaded to join in with them at a training session at Dynamix Skatepark on Sunday morning. Along with approx. 12 or so young children, one teenager and one other adult I was taught a few key moves of Parkour by both Hollie and Lee in a one hour long session.

The moves we learnt were:

• Wallrun - Learnt in two parts: the beginning 'run' up the wall and the subsequent 'pull up' on to the top of the wall (in this case a half pipe).
• Roll

It was a really interesting process and I thoroughly enjoyed experiencing how they taught Parkour. I noticed that the level of concentration I needed to maintain during the moves was really high and as the session went on I began to appreciate the level of self-awareness that everyone else seemed to have.

I really enjoyed taking part and I hope to join Hollie and Lee out and about in town next weekend. I really hope that by that time the muscles in my body, that I clearly never use, will have stopped hurting!!!