informal urban practices

OBJECT SWAP( SLOW-PACED)

Jiazhen Ken Chen & IRENE

‘T.H’ Project group will work as small groups underneath the banner of a larger collective due to commitments and varying timetables.
Each member will undertake smaller stand alone projects that will collectively, when grouped side-by- side, contribute and relate to what is termed “T.H”……….

Key Phrases:
Communication; trial maze, observation.
Ephemeral; movement, Transient.
Stimulation of senses.
Momentum/ Transition.
Appropriation.
Emulation; Behaviour; Social Convention.
Viral Element; Growing/ spreading marketing practices.
Activation.
Relation-scapes.
Empowerment.
Hivemind.

‘T.H’ aims to:
1/ Members will use ‘T.H’ as a framework to expose public perception and social conventions.
2/ This will facilitate an experience for the user-participant to question urban social construct. With the stimulus provided we aim to harness the collective creativity that is born from individual speculation and interpretation.

Mediums/ Process to be undertaken;
Guerrilla advertising.
Culture Jamming (websites, blog, stickers, postering)
MX Classifieds.
Video, public performance.
Word-of-mouth.
Graffiti.
Subconscious objects.
Profile/ Branding.

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

The basic concept of Hop Scotch is imbedded in many minds from a young age, although it was still surprising to see how many different groups of people were up to have a go without any prompting what so ever. A lot of people walked right by even after noticing the hop scotch, some dodged the chalk like it was lava, and others with a spring in their step took full advantage of the new addition to the sidewalk and hopped backwards and forwards. It was surprising to see that the hop scotch squares in more secluded areas were a lot more popular and people often stopped to complete a few rounds before carrying on with their daily activity.

By Jiazhen Ken Chen and Oscar Langley

The premise of our intervention was to appropriate urban space to set up the game twister. For the experiment we set up a twister set on the lawns of the State Library with a sign indicating free twister. We were expecting children to be the main instigators of this informal urban appropriation, however the groups that came up to play were all “university age” people. We chose the game twister for this experiment because it is an instantly recognisable game for most people and it can make people somewhat lose their inhibitions and play a game in an otherwise formal urban environment.

Elliot Henkel, Tim Bagnara

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.

The Human Race

We are surrounded by so much visual pollution in the dense urban space. The Negative effects of advertising and methods of re‐enforcing public insecurities are a by product of the places we live and work in. This intervention was aimed at inserting an element of positive re‐enforcement in commuter’s everyday routine.
The parody element of the ‘the human race’ was also to comment on the nature of our removed interaction with the many people that surround us within the city environment, the lack of interaction and the competitive mindset of the corporate CBD environment.

Chris and Michelle.

With help from Phil and Kerris.

Our intervention was based around what people will believe. To do this we created a number of signs, some being believable while others were slightly more ridiculous. The signs were then placed in locations around federation square and we waited to see what would happen.

For the most part they were not even noticed as people when about their business. Some glances were made and in a few case the “fake rules” were broken for all too see.

Overall it would have been far more interesting to do this over a much longer time frame which may have seen shop owner and local authorities get involved

Ryan O’Donnell

Miranda Nesci

Our concept of intervention was quite passive. We wanted to see whether or not people would investigate things that were outside the norm, or controversial in nature; such as abandoning a baby, extinguishing a cigarette in a baby’s face or throwing a baby into a bin. Regardless of how believable or unbelievable the situation, we expected that the bizarre nature of the actions would jostle some people out of that ant-like state that we have all experienced when we have places to be and schedules to keep. Instead we found that most people successfully filter out a lot of what is going on in a public space and those that did notice were often dragged along by the current of pedestrians before they could really get a good grasp of what was happening.

by Phil & Daniel

with help from Michelle & Chris