At the time, I didn't quite realise how much of an affect it was going to have. It was actually only at the point I was writing up the first draft of my thesis (yes, this happened over the summer, hence the distinct lack of blog posts) that I really reflected on the impact of the event in any great detail. Somehow, it seems to have imperceptibly shifted my approach—both to place and also to my research...
Through my engagement with the EWG workshop I began to think about the potential residing in a more ‘immediate’ experience of place. As a designer I have always been taught to research the brief thoroughly in a relatively traditional way, and to develop a range of ideas that are capable of being defended or reinforced by that research. In Edinburgh I was surrounded by sound, video and performance artists, and one in particular who was running drumsticks along railings just to see what it sounded like, jumping onto their bike to film themselves cycling to a derelict Wild West town south of the city, and recording howling dogs to create a canine reworking of Ennio Morricone’s spaghetti Western soundtrack. Being literally out of my usual place, and surrounded by people working in a different way enabled me to shift my thinking and approach slightly. This approach, primarily using walking, perhaps wasn’t as extreme as those listed above, but it became both more hands on and, paradoxically, a way of letting go more.
Both of the small projects (A Haptic Journey and Old Town) executed post EWG derive, in a sense, from a ‘gut instinct’ of Edinburgh. There was no in depth research, no interviews, and limited exploration of a wider context. It was, and to an extent remains, an immediate response to my surroundings and my experience of them. This is not how I usually work—other design test projects tell more peopled stories of place, utilise diverse types of content and develop more obviously complex narratives. However, these are built over time, and often with participants, but I was in Edinburgh for one week only. This time frame effectively became a parameter that led to a productive exploration of the value of improvisation, immediacy and experience within the context of the act of walking.
At the point I returned from Edinburgh I only had one more design test project to complete before finishing the practice, and it is clear to me that my experience there, and the work produced from it, informed this final project. Food Miles, although ultimately a complex, intertextual weaving of different types of information, has its roots in an experiential, experimental exploration of place. To experience Hackney through the food of its diverse cultures brings a multi-sensory approach to the research. Tilley, drawing on phenomenological thinking, suggests that ‘the body is the medium through which we know place’ (2004:25), and that ‘such experience is always synaesthetic’ (2004:221). Whereas up till now I had predominantly focused on sight and sound in my approaches—with touch explored in one of the Edinburgh books—through taste and smell I was now bringing my full range of senses to the exploration of place. It was smell that drew me to the idea for the design test project in the first place, for it is what I noticed most as I walked along the road charting the different commercial premises. It can be a powerful, sensory way of experiencing place as Zawieja (2010:141) captures in her description of Mare Street, Hackney.
Mare Street cuts through East London like a diagram. In a straight line from north to south one smell follows another. Fried chicken, sweet potatoes, salt fish pie, banana cake. Spring rolls, lemon grass, soy sauce, fish sauce. Cumin, ginger, dal, coriander, cinnamon, saffron. Lamb, yoghurt, sesame, mint, hummus, thyme.
Through this research I was literally ingesting and digesting place, and whilst the eventual design piece did not attempt to solely represent this physical exploration, as the EWG Old Town book did, this new, more immediate, bodily approach clearly informed my thinking and the development of the idea.
Throughout these projects there is perhaps a thread subtly appearing that is about ‘letting go’ of one’s own research journey. To have no preconceived idea of destination, or perhaps in research terms, no hypothesis, might be seen in some more positivist circles as foolish, but in this research it has been entirely productive. To open myself up to exploring places without knowing where I might be going, to make rubbings instinctively without questioning ‘why’, to engage in unstructured, open-ended, often unplanned, conversations, has taken me on a journey that I could not have anticipated. It brings to mind the flaneurie or dérives of the Surrealists and the Situationists, and several of Bruce Mau’s (1998) statements from his Incomplete Manifesto for Growth:
Allow events to change you
You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.
Process is more important than outcome
When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we’ve already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.
Drift
Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.
Engaging in this way with regard to place also seems appropriate, as it is always ongoing, always undetermined and unfinished (Massey 2005) therefore, there is no one ‘truth’ to establish.
Whilst I won't talk specifically about the design of the two EWG inspired test projects, as I have covered that in previous posts, I will say the the hands on approach fostered by EWG also fed into the work. Old Town especially, developed through a physical interaction with the materials used and would not have developed in the way it has without a ‘hands on’ engagement with paper and scalpel. Such immediate, often low-tech, types of experiments and prototyping bring into play Schön’s (1987) notion of reflection-in-action—a more immediate type of analysis executed during the process of making. This form of reflection may only be recorded in brief note form on a prototype, or perhaps not even that as one may realise a potentially useful development within the actual process of making, enabling a swift change of direction that is recorded through the adjustment of the design of the prototype rather than in words.
However, a low-tech approach does not have centre on pre-production prototypes. It can be seen as an accessible way of approaching the geo/graphic design process—one that is inclusive to both disciplines, rather than just graphic designers who may have access to specialist printing facilities. Also, low-tech doesn’t have to equate with low production values. For example, both EWG books use 80gsm ivory coloured paper purchase from Staples and are printed using a £60 black and white laser printer. The colour of the paper echoes much of the brick I encountered in Edinburgh and the thinness of the paper leads to some show through, which I think adds to the sense that is more to reveal behind each page. The original rubbings for A Haptic Journey were done onto the ordinary paper of cheap sketchbooks with a wax crayon, and the facsimile map was scanned using a £70 desktop scanner. Binding has been done by hand after consulting instructions from the web. There is nothing here that is prohibitively expensive or difficult to get hold of. Perhaps the perception of a phrase like ‘artist’s book’ conjures up the kind of limited editions that cost thousands of pounds and are held in the special collections of national galleries. However, this idea of a limited edition can be used in a positive way—equipment such as photocopiers, scanners, A4 paper and printers, found in most academic departments regardless of discipline, can be used to generate work that goes beyond the traditional use of such tools.
So, somehow, perhaps by a strange process of osmosis, my research and practice has developed dramatically through my engagement with EWG, and for me, it is that strangely productive conundrum of being both more hands on and yet more hands off that has affected the greatest change.
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