Pop Rocks

After the presentation feedback I had a look for what existing installations might be out there that support my direction and found this amazing article from an installation in Canada of bean bags type structures.

http://www.archdaily.com/279536/pop-rocks-soft-urban-boulder-field-installation-matthew-soules-architecture-afjd-studio

Presentation feedback

Had presentations today and it was an interesting process - I was slightly worried about how interesting people would/wouldn't find mine, and I was also disappointed that I wasn't going to be able to stay to see them all because of prior work commitments.

2 of the 4th year groups presented and then I was the third to present and I felt hugely intimidated as they had both had their physical testing installations there to show and I was more or less just giving a power point presentation. I felt like it was really hard to show my process any other way though as a lot of what I've done over the past 3 weeks has been developmental thinking and research, thinking and research, and then that beanbag testing in the last week.

I feel comfortable with what I presented however and have summarised the feedback:

- It was suggested that I look into the psychology of people's need to make spaces their own.

- How do you empower people to feel like they are allowed to engage with and move things?

- Keep challenging people, by having things change on them

- Could I focus more on the beanbags and forget the structural work I've done to make more of an interesting/unique beanbag installation?

- The current structure I've drawn up is almost a juxtaposition - by putting the tree in the middle you are blocking conversation, and the hard rigid structure opposes what I'm trying to do introducing the soft cushioning beanbags.

- Could I separate the tree and the boxes? 

- Is there then a cultural issue with a tree being movable? Separating the roots from the Earth??

- If your thinking about the tree acting as shade - why does it have to be a tree??

- There are lots of opportunities from the beanbag

   - different colours, textures, shapes (could these be used to reflect Wellington more?)

   - what would the beanbags be like at night? glow in the dark??

   - have a look at the very popular at the moment "air sacks"

   - people started coming up with crazy ideas like how the beanbags could change with heat, or time        of day etc.

Also - I had to look up the term serendipity as Euan uses it continuously!

Serendipity:

the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way

Presentation file

I created a powerpoint presentation with some speech notes to cover off my process over the past 3 weeks.

Urban Camouflage; What an extremely broad, and difficult concept. So one of the first thing’s I did on day 1 of this project was to try and define this term for myself. I came up with urban camouflage as a method of interrupting the bland city scape with an artistic intervention to revitalise a space. And I continued to refer to this throughout my developments.

Location was the driver for what my project would become. When walking through the city centre, I went through Civic Square and was surprised to see it in a different light to what I remember. For me Civic Square was always more of an exciting destination as a young girl, it was a hub for the city and full of life however what I saw on Tuesday was a forgotten space, that hadn’t been given any love for some time. So I made the decision then and there to use this project to develop an idea for revitalising Civic Square.

My first insight when doing some research was that Civic Square is a reasonably recent addition to Wellington, having only been built in the 90’s, what was interesting though was that the design for it was inspired by the public squares of Europe and dropped into our little city without much consideration to the differences between Europe and New Zealand. Because of this, my first direction was to try and bring our kiwi identity into the space and I created a survey to try and get a feel for what people loved about Wellington. Getting responses for the survey proved more difficult than I’d anticipated though, and the comments I did receive were challenging to try and interpret in the space. 

So going back and spending more time in Civic Square, I watched how people used the space and it was a great turning point for my project. My focus started to become more on the way people used the space, and I did a lot of research into zoning and different seating arrangements as I felt like this was what was really missing from the space. At the same time I still had the issue of lighting, and addressing all the different corridor entrances in the back of my head as more ideas I’d like to tackle in the Square, but I put them aside and focused on seating.

Further research and feedback led me to a point where in my head, I was designing a structure that would function as a seat, incorporate lighting, and a tree/greenery. But when I say it out loud it sounds like a really messy concept – and it was – which made me struggle to get my head into it.

It was at that point I decided to just step back and do some reading and generate some new thinking in terms of trying to re-center the user within my design. The article I read was called “Placemaking and the Future of Cities” and there was a moment in it where they discussed how when placemaking is conducted with transparency and good faith, the community feels a sense of ownership and engagement with the space and design then serves as function, which really connected with me. It reinforced that just because we’re designers, doesn’t mean we always know best, and to generate something that will succeed, you need to put the user first and know what it is they want.

With this reading in the forefront of my mind, I went into our interim presentation feeling reasonably solid in my thinking but nervous about my actual output, but I came out of interim with a much clearer head. Euan helped me to understand that my concept wasn’t about seating as such but more about creating engagement in the space. My fixation on this form of seating had distracted me from my purpose which was to create a way to make users want to spend time at and engage with Civic Square. The feedback from my peers led me to think of ways I could test public engagement. What I came up with was using the bean bags, so on Tuesday I set up 11 bean bags in the green space at the bottom of the War Memorial to see if the public would use them and rearrange them to suit their needs as this was what was really at the centre of my thinking.

This testing was another major step forward in my project because it made me think a lot about the freedom and comfort people were enjoying, and how this was more pertinent to my project than some of my initial ideas. At the height of my test, all the bean bags were in use, and there were more people milling around the space who looked as though they were hoping to see a spare beanbag that they could use for themselves. This justified to me that people do find ‘seating’ a great way to engage with the space, but it was the freedom of the beanbags that was so popular. Yes there were plenty of bench seats, but these were rigid and restrictive in their placement, people enjoyed being able to shift and sit in the bean bags however they wanted, and in groupings that they wanted.

A highlight for me during the testing was a young couple that spent over an hour sitting in the beanbags who I actually talked to at the end. They were absolutely taken with the idea and wanted to know where to sign to get on board, they thought it was a permanent thing, and they were just so grateful for the opportunity and the time they’d spent there.

I was reinspired by this test and decided that moving forward I needed to rethink my rigid structures. Talking through my project with family, I had my light bulb moment, which was that with this project I am focusing on my generation and that opened up new doors. There are already plenty of park benches to suit those older generations who are familiar with them and find them easier to get in and out of within Civic Square. To rejuvenate it for the future I needed to be introducing something fun, and malleable and create an experience for the public that would be different every time.

My outcome is to introduce beanbags into the Civic Square space, but I also found a way to incorporate all of the other research and strong ideas I’d had earlier. The design solution I have come up with is a semi-portable structure - by semi-portable I mean it would be designed on lockable wheels to secure it’s place in the Square unless needing to be moved out for a special event. This structure houses a tree in the centre, storage for beanbags on either side, and a solid seating structure when the storage is shut. The storage would be lockable and ideally someone from an organisation like the council would be responsible for unlocking them on a nice morning, and then maybe a security guard would be responsible for locking them up again in the evening but that would be further thought through with more time. There is also shadow box lighting, and lights up in the tree powered by solar energy to excite people in the evenings. The idea is that I’d place two or 3 of these along the edge of the turf line as indicated in this image to create a kind of zoning between those people using the space as a walk through from A to B, and those there to spend time in the space.

This idea incorporates all of the things I was trying to earlier but in a more sophisticated manner.

I have still generated an idea for a type of structure with a tree in it to introduce more greenery and nature into the space, and also provide that all important shade on sunny days.

I have kept an element of lighting in there because I really want to encourage people to interact with the space past the standard daylight hours that people use it for now.

And following my successful testing I have settled on beanbags as a form of seating/comfort to encourage people to use and spend time in the space.

Over the course this project, I definitely feel like I’ve been up, down, sideways, pretty much all over the place, but it’s amazing how an idea can progress under a little bit of a pressure for example today’s presentation deadline. In saying that I have really enjoyed the last 3 weeks, pushing my own creativity further then I would’ve expected and being able to see how differently everyone’s creative bent operates, so thank you all and I’d welcome some feedback.

More research to build on my context

http://www.pps.org/reference/generalseating/

"Good public spaces give people a choice of where and how they would like to sit. They provide different types of seating options such as ledges, steps, benches, moveable chairs as well as different places or locations within the same area, such as in the sun, in the shade, in groups, alone, close to activity, or somewhat removed from activity."

"Supporting how people sit or ways in which people like to sit on benches or seats affects seating design."

http://www.pps.org/reference/seating/

"Probably the best kind of seating is the moveable chair. Not perfect in every situation, it is nearly so in most. Why? Several reasons. Firstly, chairs are more comfortable than benches. Secondly, they’re inexpensive. Costs vary, but you can provide roughly 10 moveable chairs for the price of one bench (or even less). Thirdly, people can arrange chairs how they like, to sit nearer or farther apart, and move them around to either sun or shade (click on the video clip above to see moveable seating in action). This choice allows people to exercise their options to sit near an event, or away in the quiet, wherever they may feel more comfortable. Many times, they will leave them right where they are, or move them just a few inches."

"Certainly, providing moveable furniture opens up the possibility that it might be stolen. However, if the area is supervised by an attendant, or if the furniture is located near another amenity or activity where staff is present, then vandalism and theft become much less likely (Bryant Park reports that just a few of its hundreds of moveable chairs are stolen each year). "

http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/journals/research-journal/issue-03/seating-and-sitting-in-the-v-and-a-an-observational-study/

"The presence of people in public spaces has long been considered an important indicator of a healthy public life. Danish architect and academic Jan Gehl, one of the most influential researchers of public space in Europe in the 20th century, regards lingering (not to be confused with the more pejorative ‘loitering’) to be the key indicator of how well a public space is working, because it shows that a space offers enough interest (something to watch) and comfort (somewhere to sit) for people to choose to spend time there. Gehl regards seating as one of the most important provisions in public spaces to encourage lingering, because ‘[o]nly when opportunities for sitting exist can there be stays of any duration. If these opportunities are few or bad, people just walk on by’. (5) In outdoor spaces, weather plays a decisive role in how attractive a space may be on any given day. Because of this, one of the key indicators used by Gehl Architects in studies of cities around the world is whether or not a space shows a large discrepancy in use between winter and summer months."

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/5-ways-we-design-our-cities-make-them-inhospitable-human-life-photos

“Urban spaces are aggressively rejecting soft, human bodies.”  

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/aug/04/pops-privately-owned-public-space-cities-direct-action

"When space is controlled, we tend to police ourselves, to monitor our behaviour and to limit our interactions"


Cities / Engage people in the design of public spaces / 02 March 2015 / 3 / Joana Mendo

"Who are we designing our spaces and our cities for? The people that use them"

"In the medieval period, everyone in a city or region would have been involved in building and the thinking behind its grand cathedral. Back then, the specialists, the artists, the craftsmen were sourced locally. There was a sense of participation and ownership among populations that lasted for generations."

Visually illustrating my concept

Workbook pages

Refining my concept

Workbook pages

This testing was another major step forward in my project because it made me think a lot about the freedom and comfort people were enjoying. 

A height during the test was all the bean bags being in use, and more people milling around the space who looked as though they were hoping to see one spare. 

This justified to me that people do find ‘seating’ a great way to engage with the space, but it was the freedom of the beanbags that was so popular. 

A highlight for me during the testing was a young couple that spent over an hour sitting in the beanbags who I actually talked to at the end. They were absolutely taken with the idea and wanted to know where to sign to get on board, they thought it was a permanent thing, and they were just so grateful for the opportunity and the time they’d spent there.