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Th. Morton, “Attune” in Cohen, J.J. and Lowell D.. Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking. University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/book/57348.
ed. M. Kuzmanovic and N. Gaffney, Dust & Shadow Reader #2, FoAM, 2019. https://fo.am/publications/dust-shadow-reader-2/
R. Kirschner and K. Franinović, ”Interacting in Entangled Environments” in Not at Your Service: Design Manifestos, Eds. B. Franke and H. Matter, Birkhäuser Verlag, 2020.
Take a walk through the city of Zurich and develop new ways of observation. A set of sensing and sketching exercises can provide an in-depth understanding of urban space, its infrastructures and interactions, and thus is the basis for a multisensory and people-centered design.
Exercise 1. Sound Postcards
The groups of four to five participants walk to an urban area chosen by the group. At the location, they close their eyes and listen to their surroundings for five minutes. The leader of the group keeps the time and the security of the others in the group. After the silent and blinded observation, each person creates a visual representation of sounds and soundscape they heard in an A5 format (or a notebook page). After approximately five to ten minutes, the participants share their visual annotations and describe what they have perceived.
Exercise 2. Awareness
Focus visually on one thing in the environment and stay with it for 5 minutes. Don’t move your eyes to other things in your surroundings. Sketch and write down what you saw and felt.
Exercise 3. Relations
Look at all the other things in the environment and see how they related to your thing from the previous exercise. Draw at least 3-5 relations and describe how they relate to the thing you were focusing on.
Session 4: Ecological Thinking / Interaction : Theory in the Field
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Gibson, J.J. (1986). The Theory of Affordances. In Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc.
GibsonJ-The-Theory-of-Affordances.pdfNakamura, J., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2009).The concept of flow. In Snyder, C. R., & Lopez, S. J. (Ed.). Oxford handbook of positive psychology. Oxford University Press, USA. 89-105
Noë, A. (2010). Du bist nicht Dein Gehirn. Eine radikale Philosophie des Bewusstseins. München: Piper Verlag, München. Noe_DubistnichtdeinGehirn.pdf
Exercise 4. Sensorial Ecologies
Move through an urban area and observe how its elements interact between each other.
Sketch and describe sensorial ecologies :
soundscape of the area
lightscape of the area
microclimate of the area (temperature/humidity/smells…)
Describe how you (or another single person) interact with those ecologies.
Exercise 5. Social Ecologies
Observe an area and how people interact with their surroundings and each other.
Develop and describe its social ecologies through:
Flow map (movement of people in space, grouping, body positions).
Attractor map: Describe and sketch social attractors (where/how people can isolate? where/how do people gather? for how long? why?) Describe and sketch spatial attractors (what attracts people and what rejects them?)
Session 5: Inter-Action
5. October 2020.
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