Designing Design Methods
Conventional design practice has a prescribed series of representation tools that generally privilege the object or the view. It is apparent that the nature of our work necessitates drawing from a much broader range of media and techniques from art and design. How do you design for uncertainty, the constantly shifting contours of the ephemeral, or for things that are beyond your control? The singular investigation proves problematic; the critical use of multiple media at a series of appropriate scales is required. (We don’t have one ‘hero shot’ amongst us.)
Our design tools shift from small scale catalogues of the prosaic, to the large scale map or material diagram of the abstract – and back again. We design design methods to engage and empower communities in consultation processes, students within the laboratory of the design studio and workshop, and citizens within the broader environment.
The following are details from the archive installation of some of the techniques, methods and media that we interpret and employ.
COLLECTIONS
Sand Helsel. Oranges. 1999- Photographic Series
The collection is my primary design method. I use this technique as an observational tool, a careful way of seeing, and as a source of raw data, awaiting an overlay of meaning. It is inherently neutral at its onset and exists to be added to, rearranged and classified; the hierarchies can and do change.
I had become increasingly aware of discussions of differences amongst people: cultural, political, social and religious and I questioned why we never start with what we have in common. In my travels I decided to look for things we all share (food) and imagined you might be able to find oranges everywhere. I was correct, and the oranges have become a powerful metaphor in my pursuit of common pleasures.
Sand Helsel. Stack s. 1999- Photographic Series
I am naturally drawn to the market areas of Asian cities but I soon realise that my collection of images are not random shots on my roll of tourist snaps but a carefully orchestrated investigation of a phenomenon that I need to understand.
These urban rituals of exchange are undertaken by those who have an intimate relationship with their subject matter (or wares) and seem to thrive without an architect or designer. To quote Joseph Beuys, if indeed, “everyone is an artist”, then what is the role of the expert? This prompts the further question of what the architect and urban designer should be doing, and how can one meaningfully engage others in the design process in a meaningful way.
SueAnne Ware. Turn Left at Albuquerque. 2005
This project drew on an approach to mapping that had been explored earlier in Albuquerque, influenced by the Situationists and the playful seriousness of their documentation of everyday experiences and ‘spectacles’. A map has agency. It is not merely representational but operational so that the project was not just about unearthing existing layers but succeeding them with new contributions. One aim was to reveal various narratives within a site. Another was to consider invisible and visible forces which shape our public places. There are few projects or approaches by professional designers which explore or incorporate this knowledge. This project explored a productive web of intersections between urban artefacts, methods of observation, and modes of thought. It appreciated that knowledge expressed in maps is both a record and an active influence on spatial appreciation and use.
Charles Anderson. Ceilings. 1988- Photographic archive
Charles Anderson. Mattresses. 1992 – Photographic archive
PARTICIPATORY PRACTICE
Mel Dodd [muf]. What Do You Do and Where Do You Do It? 2008
A series of conversations, workshops and speculations with local people about the opportunities of a creek territory, exposed the underlying issues of use and misuse by children and teenagers; particularly the use of rubbish to construct places to play. Older members of the community saw this behavior as misuse, but it was evident that the colonization was a critical outlet for children; less of a pleasure and more of a thrill.
Foregrounding spatial narratives was critical to exposing the fragile and modest aspects of occupation, and was driven through the making of self constructed films, workshops, public events and a geo-placed website, a digital map entitled What do you do and where do you do it?
Mel Dodd [mufaus] Kings Creek Strategy. 2009. Montage
A socially orientated project, commissioned by the local community, this strategy sought to create an action plan for incremental improvements to a creek territory strewn with rubbish, running from a housing estate to the foreshore, in the town of Hastings. Using research including workshops with local children addressing rubbish and misbehavior, the project acknowledged contested uses of the public realm, and exposed the paradox of feral ground: a typology of space which is outside of predetermined boundaries, marginal but valuable, its ecology threatened by misuse but essential as a cultural landscape.
Lynda Roberts [public assembly]. Wearable Artifactory, Camberwell Markets. 2007-
The production net encourages a new cycle of food consumption and production. This new system is integrated with public space acting as a catalyst for change in the way public space is viewed, used and how people interact with each other in it. By converging social and environmental resources in a more proficient way new value is given to social involvement, public space and everyday activities.
Mel Dodd [muf aus]. Flotsam. Pamplets, booklets, posters, postcards
MAPPING
SueAnne Ware, Cassie Lucas, Bridget Keane, Melanie Harvey. Noticing Melbourne in Strangely Familiar. 2007
Drawing on the work of the Situationists, this project involved exploring diverse and personal approaches to ‘mapping’, challenging the reductive propensity of conventional architectural representation and master planning. The development of urban design work which utilizes everyday idiosyncrasies of the urban fabric is at the core of my research and memorial making practice. Albuquerque, a city unfamiliar to me, was documented. The maps acknowledged multiple, simultaneous, shifting and even contradictory experiences. The subsequent exhibition was a somewhat playful look at a very short stay in a very richly textured place, with lessons in self-consciousness applicable to the production of maps in general, and with subsequent implications for the production of urban and spatial design proposals.
Lim Hui Yuan + Hung Jia Xin Postboxes in Ta An District , 2001
Observational techniques from Taipei Operations (Sand Helsel and K.C.Bee) challenge the way we look at the city. All maps lie, and reflect the biases of the mapmaker who conventionally delineates property ownership or outlines civic infrastructure.
We, too, are biased mapmakers. We start small (with post boxes for example) and collect our data from first-hand experience by being there, and being specific to time and place. From there we generate larger scale maps by recognising patterns, connections and systems that allow for different readings of the city, and subsequently allow for different responses. The creation of the map is the design of the site, and a critical first move in the design process.
GENERATIVE PROCESSES
Charles Anderson [with Jan van Schaik]. Gschnas 03: Trailing, Victorian Ministry For the Arts Gallery and Office Spaces, Southbank, Melbourne. 2000. Installation: masking tape, computer animation, drawings.
The ‘Gschnas’ project investigates the stochastic system of stains and blotches to generate a ‘chronography’ and choreography of space, suggesting a possible topography or terrain of the unconscious. Attending to stains, blotches and flecks, the ‘Gschnas’ project inaugurates an art of the blot. Noticing the processes of time and the tracings of lived experience, having a regard for the formless, seeing the overlooked, giving a place to the imperfect, and giving value to the valueless, the ‘Gschnas’ protests against the clearing away of the tabla rasa and the shadowless hygiene of the modernist project.
‘Trailing’ proposed a kind of non-tectonics of the line: a wall drawing, a process where by space is drawn out and in, a gathering of place by the making of a performative line. Inspired by and yet trailing after the work of the same name by Brazilian artist, Lygia Clarke, ‘Trailing’ sought an engagement with the production of space as a performative entwined dance.
Charles Anderson [with Jan van Schaik]. Gschnas 02: kenchiku wa gomi no sei-sei, ARM Gallery, Melbourne. 1999. Installation: recycled cardboard, tape, flip book.
‘kenchiku wa gomi no sei sei’ can be variously translated as: built form generated from discarded material, architecture made from rubbish, or shelter produced from waste. ‘Kenchiku wa gomi no sei sei’ aimed to exhibit the generative potential of temporal traces and their ability to reconfigure place. In a perverse irony, this becomes a kind of reversal of the order of things whereby a second, even third, order form generated a first order form.
Anthony Fryatt & Roger Kemp.
The collaboration between Anthony Fryatt and Roger Kemp explores the interior from interrelated but different positions of mediated and negotiated space. This collaboration has emerged from a series of projects that include speculative design proposals, built spatial artefacts as well as film projects, installations, exhibitions and public designs. Negotiated and mediated environments foreground the occupant relative to the perceived and experienced, physical and virtual conditions of that space. Considering the interior through this set of ideas makes evident the complexity and fullness of interior spaces that are multilayered and simultaneous in their nature.
MODELS
Andrea Mina. HOMO FABER
An exhibition looking at the role of models in the architectural design process.
Designers use a wide range of tools to conceptualise and visualise three dimensional forms. Historically the drawing or sketch has been venerated as the primary creative tool and it has been the subject of many exhibitions. However, behind the scenes another, equally important device has been largely ignored: the ‘working’ model. While ‘presentation’ models have often been displayed as a simulation of the finished building, the rough model is rarely celebrated for its critical role in shaping design. Homo Faber is an exhibition of working models that have been produced by more than twenty leading Australasian architectural and interior design firms. Alongside these physical and digital models are as series or works which explore different dimensions of the spatial model. Homo Faber has been curated and presented as part of a major national research project into architectural design by a team of four senior academics drawn from RMIT University and the University of Newcastle.
Richard Black [Times Two Architects]. Tarilta Road Residence + Studio
This is a small building in a big landscape. Models are used throughout the design process to explore a range of relationships between the building and its site. Several models have explored the relationship between the building and the sites steep topography, where the carving and reshaping of the ground are seen as a key architectural operation. Other studies have focussed upon the material and formal aspects of the western façade and its potential to evoke site histories along with the performance of afternoon sunlight.
SECTION
Richard Black [Times Two Architects]. Charles Street
The section has been a critical design tool for our practice as a means of knitting a new work into an existing context. In this project, the sectional profile of the existing building was mirrored in the new addition allowing us to successfully negotiate strict heritage guidelines. Internally, this gabled volume was sculpted in section, rather than plan, forming a collection of spaces that provide the additional accommodation required. Internal rooms do not always follow the external gable silhouette, creating an unexpected spatial sequence between the new and existing buildings.
X-FIELD 