Spring 2022
Group members: Elina Assersson, Meron Habtemariam, Romina Houshmand
Co-creating Engagement in Ordinary places
– Culture, Municipality & Social Inclusion
Our Brief was a pre-study aiming for a longer project lead by Liane Thuvander and collaborating with the Culture Departments of the following municipalities: Mölndal, Partille, and Alingsås. The core question for this brief was to create living interpretations of the “Gestaltad Livsmiljö” (Designed Living Environments) – a new politic for architecture, form and design. The goal was to take the Gestaltad Livsmiljö and make it come to life through the narratives of both the people and places it can, will and already effects. In each of the collaborating municipalities (or through a deep dive of just one of them), a selection of an ordinary spot was be studied, mapped, and investigated whereas the stakeholders, the local people, and the local artists could lend their voices to a developing narrative.
In response to insights and needs from each municipality, we decided to create the concept of an umbrella project to connect the three of them and satisfy the needs of each municipality. We made a concept mainly based on public narratives that can give space to the community‘s voice and its stories. The concept can be adapted to each municipality and developed independently. We had different workshops where we tried the methods together with our teachers and colleagues.
In this project, the aim with designing each method is to compile stories in order to get to know the inhabitants closer, find their fears and excitements, take a closer look at the area they live, extract their heritage and picture their future. All these following methods are applied in order to increase the interaction between inhabitants and the public sectors. However, our main focus and field of investigation was the tunnel in Partille.
- 1. Questions on the wall vs. Question box
1.a. Placing a box and asking the passengers to leave their answers there. Here people felt safe, because they could answer confidentially – they responded to the questions openly. Since they could share their impressions, thoughts and feelings without being judged, participants felt the value of their participation.
1.b. Placing a reframed version of the same questions on three papers on the wall. People who were in a hurry preferred to speak up about their issues verbally and we wrote instead of them.
- 2. Illustration and sketching
For those inhabitants who are more passionate about artistic approaches and are keen to share visual inspirations, we provided black and white photos from the field (3 different pictures) and asked the passengers to illustrate their visions for improving the ideas around the tunnel. Goals with this method was to get a vision of people‘s perceptions, let the citizens illustrate their wishes, dreams, trigger excitement, make the citizens feel involved with a practical drawing method and also to skim through their imagination.
3. Playing field games
To engage more participants and take children into account, we designed a backup method to compile more answers as well as examining the possibility of playing inside the tunnel.
In the process of the game they had to answer 3 questions. Although youth and children engaged quite well, no adult showed interest in staying longer in the tunnel than their time to pass. With this method we aimed to reach playfulness and adjustability to the area‘s dimensions, while inviting younger groups to participate to gather more responses.
By visiting all the municipalities we got a sense of how complex this issue was – a matter of politics, sensitivity and ethics of the information that we gathered and also dealing with the expectations of real clients.
The first step was to understand the stakeholders system and have a clear image regarding the people involved in those places and their importance.
The project resulted with a concept delivery to our partners on how the partner organisations can continue, consider or take with themselves in their future work – an Umbrella concept that can be applied and adaptable to the different municipalities and locations based on public narratives.
For instance, since Partille’s focus is on a tunnel, a passway, we require stories that feel safe and recognizable, evoke safety in passengers and also don‘t take a lot of time for reading. Instead Alingsås main focus is on a square which means people have time to stay and read through those stories.
The same spot can have different uses and outcomes, but a common start regarding public point of view, collaborative processes and the difference between fast/slow stories can be an important initial step for any project.
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Individually, after the project was done I came up with a way to vizualize the opinions of people about a tunnel that we investigated in Partille. I have used the metaphor of tunnel vision to conceptualize the visual and then I tried to integrate some opinions in the visual of the tunnel.
