Laurene Vaughan

SHOW AND TELL: ACCESSING AND COMMUNICATING IMPLICIT KNOWLEDGE THROUGH ARTEFACTS

This paper contributes to the current discourse on the role of artefacts in facilitating and triggering interaction among people. The discussion will focus on artefacts used as part of an interview method developed in order to discover knowledge that was observed but absent from both project reports and other documentation within multidisciplinary collaborative research projects, located within the field of Interaction Design. Using artefacts in an interview context enabled participants to reveal insights that were, in turn, participatory and human-centred. Thus the method was effective and appropriate in illuminating knowledge situated in interaction. This ethnomethodological tool enabled participants to reflexively externalize their understanding of the complex interactions that occur within projects, encouraging participation, interaction, visualization, reflection and communication through the use of tools aimed at capturing and illuminating the lived experiences of human engagement. These interviews were conducted with a selection of participants, chosen because they were researchers, working together within a cooperative research centre. Keywords: best practices, consultancy, critical systems, theory, user-centered design (UCD)

Embodying design: the lived relationship between artefact, user and the lived experience of design

This paper will discuss through a discussion of fashion product, what it is to inhabit design. Drawing on a broad body of literature and the reflective practice of making this paper proposes that the lived relationship between user and object is an evolving participatory act that is both temporal and located. The intimate relationship between wearer and clothing will be the focus of the discussion, and it is hoped that colleagues from a broader range of design fields will connect to the ideas as they relate to your fields of expertise and design outcomes.

Mapping the Imagined

This paper explores the relationship between the map and the imagination, the imagined and the act of representation and translation. Through a discussion of the phenomenon of imagining, the imagined and the imagination particularly as they relate to the creation of placescapes (Casey 2002), it is proposed that maps and the act of mapping enable us to travel to, and perhaps even know, places that we have never been. In this way the mapping of unknown geographies can help make the imagined real, and who knows where that may lead us.

Roaming Montréal: Seeking the Representation of the ‘Geographic Self’

My first encounter with the data and the database that was at the centre of the workshop ‘Mapping the Environmental Issues of the City,’ was at first disheartening and frustrating. I am not familiar with the workings and creation of databases. The data of my world is not ordered in the way that data emerges from a database. I work in the space between interpretation and proposition, and the data of my practice emerges from a variety of messy sources, usually in the form of texts, people, conversations and observations. The process of accessing the data is one of discovery, laying it out and peering in. The data rarely looks the same twice; it is always in a state of flux being closely aligned to the actions of the everyday. When the environmental data of Montreal arrived I couldn’t find my way into the place of such statistics. The digital files wouldn’t open, I didn’t know the file types; it was a completely foreign encounter for me. The language, the form and the location, I tried to find the synergies. I tried to see the city, but all I could see were statistics, colour gradients creating outlines of regions, each a reference to unknown locations and inhabitants. I felt locked out, once removed not just from the place, but also from this way of knowing and representing that place.

Spontaneous scenarios: an approach to user engagement

In this paper we present work on a scenario and persona based approach to exploring social software solutions for a globally distributed network of researchers, designers and artists. We discuss issues identified with scenario based approaches and a potential participatory solution adopted in this project.

The Visitors: A Collective Methodology for Encountering and Documenting an Unfamiliar Cityscape

From the Dadaist and Situationist walking interventions, to contemporary locative media events and gaming, multimodal mapping methods have been used to extend vernacular methods for knowing and experiencing place, typically cities. In June 2012 a collective of artists, designers and filmmakers converged at ETH Zurich to participate in the Cartography and Narrative Workshop: we named ourselves The Visitors. This was an interdisciplinary initiative of the Art and Cartography Commission of the International Cartographic Association. Within the context of the Workshop activities, this collective were drawn together out of a shared interest in the ‘unknowness’ of unfamiliar cities, and a desire to map place through encounter; mapping through walking in particular. The outcome of this collective ‘derive’ is a film—The Visitors—a time based digital map, that embraces the ambiguities of subjective mapping and place-making.

Understanding Through Encountering Place

The ambition to understand place is a grand ambition, and one that requires us to embrace ‘place’ as the complex socio-cultural, geospatial and temporal entity that it is. Between 2009 and 2011 an interdisciplinary community of researchers embraced the challenge of understanding place through a deep encounter with one place, the Western District of Victoria, Australia. They did this through a collaborative inquiry known as The Stony Rises Project. This project brought together researchers from the sciences, arts and humanities and resulted in touring exhibition featuring the work of 10 artists and designers, and a book Designing Place: An Archeology of the Western District which included all 17 project participants. Key to the methodology of the inquiry was an ‘artist camp’ a traditional method of situated inquiry. This was a four day situated exploration undertaken in April 2009. This chapter discusses the design of this camp and how the way in which a series of experiences were designed to enable the participant researchers to develop a deep understanding of this place through an encounter with it.

Mapping from Above/Mapping from the Ground: Mapping Environmental Issues in the City

Expectations and conventions around “mapping” differ tremendously across different domains of knowledge and practice. While in cartography, mapping refers to specific techniques and concepts for representing information related to places, in the arts and humanities this terms is used more broadly and includes a diversity of practices and expectations. More than just data, artists and other creative practitioners express understandings, fears, hopes, emotions and perceptions about places and people through mapping, and these dimensions are essential for fully understanding our relation to places.

Multi-Modal Mapping Methods And Methodologies

Cartography has always embraced different ways of representing geography. Whilst the general perception is that cartography is just about ‘maps’, other representations of geography have been explored as adjuncts to, or substitutes for, ‘the map’. This concept is not new. If we look at the second edition of the textbook on cartography by Erwin Raisz – General Cartography - he states in the Preface.

The map of fashion

The relationship between the body, fashion, the map and the making of place is a rich area of exploration by a variety of creative practitioners, anthropologists and theorists. This essay discusses the proposition that fashion, or the clothed body, is the ‘stuff’ of the inhabited landscape. Conceived of a map of fashion, this map documents and communicates an embodied landscape through a topography that lives, breathes, pulsates and evolves through the everyday actions of those that are there. The ‘place’ of this landscape is both here, and there. It is a landscape that transitions as the individual moves through the various locations of their lives. It is a landscape of the collective and the singular. My clothes mark and identify me, our clothes create an individual collective; a landscape of colour, shape and form, that is positioned within the constructed and natural world. Through the Map of Fashionthis paper and the creative artefact that it discusses, explores how every garment is an intimate map of the place making of lives lived.