informal urban practices

encouraging participants to engage with their urban surroundings through positive re-enforcement.

http://vimeo.com/15752350

T.H Project

Quinn, Sarah, Janine, and Meg

The four of us are interested in looking at ways that we can get the community involved in using recycled/reclaimed materials to help in creating something more.  We are all interested in how various structures can play a part in this.  For our first test we have created a small structure that will allow for people to put their used bottles into it.  We are interested in looking out how people engage with structure and the manner in which they add to it.  After bottles have been added, we will introduce the addition of lighting.  This test will take place during the 8×7 presentation on Tuesday night.  Below are some pictures in the process of making the structure.

Our Place is a traveling stall that invites you to take part in an interactive face-to-face and online investigation of space and its manifestations.

Keywords/Concepts:
• Space and Place
• Interaction
• Ownership
• Investigation
• Behaviour
• Community
• Temporality
• Commitment

Themes:

The ‘Our Place’ project will investigate how people engage and think about public space by encouraging people to interact and leave their mark in any way that they feel comfortable.

‘Our Place’ is interested in generating longer-term awareness about the spaces individuals inhabit commitments and documenting how the public reacts to this. It will encourage the public to engage and become active in the space, observing the transition of ‘space’ to ‘place’. They will be invited to take ownership of the project, and share its outcomes, thus learning something of their personal creative abilities that would have otherwise gone undiscovered.

‘Our Place’ is a dynamic and responsive project; the outcomes may vary depending on the site and engagement with individuals.

Methods:

‘Our Place’ will take the physical form of a nomadic stall, spending up to three days at each space. Interaction will take place face-to-face with the assistance of objects, consultation, swapping, conversation, documentation, sharing. Later, the communication, exploration and interaction will continue online, assisted by much documentation.

Regular updates in the form of text, photographs, videos and audio, as well as links to relevant websites will be employed to keep the public interested, informed and tempt them to participate. It will also make the experience more permanent and provide a source of ongoing inspiration

Group 5: Nicholas Rebstadt, Sophie Bain and Lucy Fraser

As a group of 4 we thought about activities that would be inviting for the public to participate in. We thought children’s games would be a way to lure in any attraction from the public. Laura and I thought of two ways to achieve this for our intervention. We thought about setting up a situation where it created an opportunity for the public to interact with. Our intervention was ‘Join the dots’ (an old children’s activity) which involved us printing out images constructed of dots on a page that would be left over several nights, in the streets of Melbourne and filled out by anyone that noticed them. We used Disney characters as the images to make the activity more engaging and these were our findings!

Amy & Laura

By Quinn Delany and Jacqui Manson

With help from Meg McMillan and Daniel Ward

The idea of invading the public space on one of the main thoroughfares of Melbourne city, Bourke St, by threading a long piece of red yarn twisting, winding and zigzagging down the street (in a similar action to the old City of Melbourne ad) became a test of peoples reaction and interaction to the string in what they seem to deem as ‘their space’ .

This said, we also had the intention of testing the ‘universal memory’ by using the familiar item of the striking red yarn to create this familiarity between the passers by, the memory many of them share when coming into contact with this experience, from a joint past experience having seen the melbourne add they are connected by a recollection.

LINK to partnering group video http://vimeo.com/13992326

Chris, Lucy, Nick, Sarah and Sophie
Music “I think I like u 2″ by Jamaica

People seem to be quite afraid of other people. So, for our public interaction, we removed the need to interact with other people, and left the public to interact with much less intimidating, stationary, objects. We discovered people quite liked leaving their mark on the world.

Majority of the people who engaged with the activity where in groups. We left the posters exposed for 2 hours. People seemed to feel a bit daunted because the posters were in open spaces where everyone could view each other drawing on them. We also found that the same name or characature appeared on 2 of the posters. By chance these people had walked past all the posters.

GRAMEEN BANK

The Grameen Bank was set up by Muhammad Yunus, and provides credit to the poorest of the people living in Bangledesh. These loans may only be around $27, but this enables them to repay debts they may have, and often start small businesses that are sustainable income for them. His banking model has now been imitated, multiplying the positive social effect of the project.

SOCIAL ENTERPRISE LONDON

This is an organisation that, “works to unite, inspire and lead London’s social enterprise movement,” by connecting social enterprises and allowing them to assist each other, thus demonstrating that social enterprise is the future of business. It holds events and training sessions, offers a consultancy and many other services to social enterprises.

THE STREET VENDOR PROJECT

Working with the street vendors of New York as well as volunteers and graphic designers, the project strives to protect the rights of vendors and promote the beneficial nature of their practice. They educate the vendors and the public, as well as rally councils for fairer laws to allow vendors the opportunity to make a living. Although it is a not-for-profit organisation, it focuses on enabling the small businesses of others.

Lucy Fraser, Industrial Design

I decided to chose this studio after watching the india informal street trading which on the train rails.  they are so clever and they set up adn pack are so efficient. i am interested in the foraml and informal urban activities. understand the sturcture of the city will help me to study the urban space occupation.

i would like to have that chance to study adn share our experience with other discipline students. the main motivation is learning  europe and asian subcultures  through those informal urban activities.

in this semester, i am interested in developing a system or a product which able to benefit urban root citizen when they are having informal practices.

Play with your city! Every day you change your city in the ways you traverse, occupy, engage with or otherwise ignore its various spaces. Architecture+Philosophy presents a panel of practitioners who have designed ways in which to engage with your own city as though for the first time. Come and play. Check it out here (RMIT 8.11.68)

Now in its sixth year, ARCHITECTURE+PHILOSOPHY provides a unique space of exchange. While what we provide is a local space – Melbourne practitioners on Melbourne issues – the series engages with questions of contemporary urbanism, planning, technology, space, system, design, distribution and other issues in the productive overlap between the two disciplines. We curate a diverse range of presentations, from research students and established academics to architecture and planning practitioners, policy makers, public artists and those working in the world between theory, buildings and the city.