85701 Research Based Design WEEK 3 FUTURE CITIES

This week’s blog entry will discuss Dan Hill’s fascinating lecture on future cities. Dan opened the lecture by echoing Kees Dorst’s ideas of strategic design, emphasizing that design today is not about solving a problem, but rather, it is about figuring out and posing the right question to be addressed.

Dan presented a unique way of seeing design, separating and breaking down the act of designing into distinct and sequential sections.

1.              UNDERSTANDING. It is of utmost importance to collect as much information as possible, analyzing and compiling data and ‘making the invisible visible’. This approach will give the designer a basis for making decisions, as well as information to then feed back to the community.

2.              STRATEGY. Secondly, design for the city encompasses ‘sensing’ the city – understanding spaces and information gathered in order to propose ways to use it to update existing structures and create new concepts which offer unique, new solutions.

3.              BEHAVIOUR. Finally, it is important to not only collect and analyse data, but to log and process human behaviour, enabling the designer to create products or structures that will change ways of thinking and perceptions.

Using this design template, Dan highlighted the importance of data to modern cities, examining how data and the web dictate the formation of patterns and networks between structures, spaces and people. For example - taking something as mundane as an email inbox log, Dan was able to reveal and physically represent patterns and design rhythms. I think this concept of creatively illustrating seemingly banal information could be applied to site research such as investigating Foley St – perhaps providing innovative and unique jumping off points for situational design ideas.

Dan also discussed the development process of design; traditionally, after a design is produced, created and distributed, no thought is given to the life of the design – what happens after this cut off point? How is the design occupied? I find this idea fascinating – to truly design for the future, design must not simply stop at production, but instead should be an evolutionary process over the lifetime of the design.

85701 Research Based Design WEEK 2 PUTTING THEORY INTO PRACTICE

Last Friday, we all took a stroll down to Foley St, the intended venue for our event at the end of the semester. The idea was to take a flaneur's attitude toward the journey, letting oneself be absorbed in the city, looking for the overlooking and experiencing the feeling of wandering the city streets. Although it was great to try to view the streets in a new way, especially around Chinatown as I live in the area but rarely take notice of the surroundings, I can't say it was a true flaneur journey as we were guided on a particular route (at a good clip too!). However, it was still a good exercise in getting the feel of the city and for me, finding beauty in the mundane.

delicious?

A different lifestyle

Reflection, refraction

A street performer, setting up in the tunnel

A flaneur's interruption.

Once at Foley, we took some time to discuss what we had noticed, seen and been impacted on along the way. Many people mentioned construction work - describing it as invasive, noisy, intrusive. I really didn't notice it too much, I was mainly preoccupied with finding artwork in peeling paint and graffiti, and left speculating at the empty, dusty buildings we encountered along the way.

Boarded up windows, dusty chained doors

Like peering back in time

It's interesting to compare what people notice and absorb - I think it is reflective of temperament, personality and where you live.

So, Foley - first impressions: skanky, dirty, ugly... in other words not so appealing. It sure is going to be a task to make this street inviting and enlivened. Our last activity for the afternoon was to create a journey somewhere in Foley highlighting something of interest in the street with a simple piece of string, an exercise in creativity and perspective. My freshly minted group (some call us group 1) focussed on hoisting an orange traffic cone into the air, highlighting how people rarely look up and take notice of what is above them.

This was after we got our string in a massive tangle and had to tediously un-scramble it of course...

Art. I am a rad knot tyer.

85701 Research Based Designing WEEK 1 'The Contemporary Flaneur'

‘Flanerie’: the art of wandering pointlessly through the city.
                                                               - Andrew Hussey (Sutton, 2010)




What is a flaneur? Traditional meanings of the term imply and individual who loses oneself in the city by walking through it, aimlessly wandering with no particular destination in mind in order to experience the city and its inhabitants.

However, I find this definition to be fundamentally flawed – I argue it is difficult, if not impossible, to wander the streets with no aim or purpose, particularly in the context of today’s modern city. Even if one were to set out with ‘flanerie’ in mind, the flaneur still has an active purpose: to try to interact with the city with no end destination, to experience the city. Certainly our ‘flanerie’ field excursion was driven by a destination, and more a study of the unappreciated and unnoticed city aspects than an aimless wander.

Hence, I propose the actions of the flaneur are not intrinsically ‘aimless’ or ‘pointless’ in nature, but are actually an active interaction with the city, revolving wholly around experience, interaction and exploration dictated by curiosity. Edmund White accurately describes the flaneur as ‘…a stroller, a loiterer, someone who ambles through a city without apparent purpose but is secretly attuned to the history of the place and in covert search of adventure, aesthetic or erotic.’ (White, 2009)

Another apt description of the flaneur is Baudelaire’s term ‘a botanist of the sidewalk’ (Sutton, 2010), illustrating the flaneur as an active participant in the life of the city, always in search of interesting and overlooked locations, objects and subtexts.

Another interesting concept is the idea of the street photographer as a flaneur. Obviously they are not without purpose, aiming to capture that ‘decisive moment’, yet they practice flanerie while in search of spaces and subjects, wandering at will and documenting the environment in which they inhabit.

(MOMAT, 2010)

                                           

Finally, both the flaneur and the street photographer are essentially anonymous in personality – the flaneur seeks to become one with the crowd to experience the city’s flow, quintessential street photographers such as Cartier-Bresson and Kertesz sought to remain disguised and hidden, unidentifiable as they captured the essence of the city and its people.

(MOMAT, 2010)

                                
 
 
 
 
REFERENCE LIST
 
White., E., 2009, The Flâneur: A Stroll through the Paradoxes of Paris, amazon.com, <7/8/10>, http://www.edmundwhite.com/html/flaneur.htm

Week 1 Lecture, The Flaneur, Sutton. P., University of Technology Sydney, 3/8/10.

The National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo (MOMAT), 2010, Exhibition, MOMAT, <7/8/10>, http://www.momat.go.jp/Honkan/HenriCartier-Bresson/


Tester, K. ed, 1994, The Flaneur, Routledge, London