informal urban practices

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.

By Helen and Rahul

The surreal, absurd and silly group project will look at what an urban treasure hunt is, in relation to informal urban pracices.

Key words:

• Interactions
• Communication
• Movement/Transitions
• Hunting Treasures
• Seeking/Finding
• Observing
• Public Games
• Social
• Spaces Around
• Stimulating Thought
• Stimulating Senses

Intending to:

The surreal, absurd and silly will be intersecting with urban treasure hunts within the public domain. We will be looking at social interactions, communicating and observing the public in conjuction with stimulating senses of excitment and adventure in a game of an urban treasure hunt. Movement and transition in relation to objectives will lead the player to the next destination.

Working methods, process and mediums:

• Video
• Audio
• Photographs
• Guerrilla Advertising
• Placements
• Maps/Locations Posted
• Site Markings

Informally Practiced from Nick Rebstadt on Vimeo.

Placing Space attempts to transform public ‘space’ into a public ‘place’. Personalising the generic. It’s about becoming activated in your surroundings.

Individuals come across the Placing Space pop-up market stall, they engage with the stall creating something – anything – with the random selection of materials provided. Once the object has been created, the experience of creating the object ‘experienced’ the object then becomes the individual’s property with one condition – whatever is done with the object, wherever it ends up, good or bad, it must be photographed and the images emailed back to the Placing Space market stall to be placed online (a non-place).

amazing

gets really relevant at around 1min 30secs

wallpaper: augmented city click here

Chris and Lucy, Industrial Design

The first thing we noticed about Preston was it’s fairly irregular train time table; it’s hard to get there and harder to leave. This unique trait enables Preston culture to remain largely uninfluenced by the outside world.
On a more serious note, in Preston we discovered many small symptoms of informal urban practices. The people of Preston are clever with their space, making use of the sidewalk, roadside, telegraph poles and the air around them, which they filled with sound. These call the passer by to participate by heeding the call of ‘fresh fruit, fresh fruit’, or tearing off a phone number. Others were personal behaviors, people preferring to sit on the grass than in the stands, park their scooters in unusual places or using milkcrates in other ways. However, even these called for a observation and remark, creating an informal activity based upon the behavior.

Jacqui Manson & Quinn Delany

Quinn and I discovered the inner city suburb of north Melbourne over the past week and found it to be a relatively middle aged to elderly population, at least from what we witnessed in and around the main thoroughfare of Errol Street.  It almost seems as if a ‘suburban cul de sac’ has been inserted into an ‘industrial wasteland’ over the past few decades. 

In Errol Street, we took in a vast array of informal urban practices revolving around ‘typical city life’ and we sought to alter them in differing ways or to make them into more  formal urban practices.