During my research up until now, it seems the link between relational art practice and spatial production is often neglected. This suggests that form making and proposition is the specialist job of the architect and it is therefore the architect’s role to ‘interpret’ the intentions of the community. This perhaps underlines the key difference between consultation and participation.
This week I looked at people and organisations who are finding ways that end users can have a participatory role in the design process. The Glasshouse Young Spacemaker Workshop challenges this by attempting to furnish young people with design skills so they can have a more tangible contributory role to the design process.
One of the exercises at the workshop was about relinquishing the temptation to reject compromise and input from other people during the design process. In our group we were each given a word and a baseboard. We were asked to make 5 minute model about the word and then pass it to the person next to us so they can work on it, then the next person, until the model is returned back to you. Finally, you present/describe the model to the group.
our team:
The word I was given was, coincidentally, ‘play’. I cut the board into four and made four ‘play patches’, rectangles of different materials ‘grass’, ‘concrete’, ‘a rug’ and ‘water’. When the model came back to me the ‘patches’ had been constructed into two dens nestled in a hill with a climbable structure around it, and the whole model was covered in graffiti. The ‘patches’ (a last minute idea) had serendipitously provided a palette of materials that allowed people to construct their own idea of play, which was then personalised through construction and graffiti. Our co- authorship had fortuitously created a temporal, flexible, and (most importantly) personalisable landscape for play.
By building ‘incompleteness’ into the design, the final model had coalesced all our ideas, providing an unforeseen insight into how one could ultimately design for play in the real world.
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