Mindmapping: to mix, develop ideas, get a better understanding of them and their main relationships or interactions
Do’s and Don’ts with Zeisel when investigating places, people and behavior
- Do ask yourself “what traces are missing?” on top of asking “What traces do I see?” to get a more complete idea of a place
- Do use unobtrusive observing when you don’t want to influence the behavior that caused the trace.
- Collect as many data as possible.
- Use the quantity of traces to acquire full value
- Keep in mind to look beyond the trace itself to understand the bigger picture
- Explain how the acts you describe relate to one another on top of choosing an appropriate level of analysis.
- Record cultural contexts for behavior when you carry observational studies in another culture/ country
- Don’t try to infer what the person who left a trace intended, just create a hypothesis.
- Don’t overlook group membership traces of an unfamiliar group
- Don’t forget that people from different cultures interpret things differently.
- Don’t forget that sensitively record situations in which mistrust is likely to have changed behavior
- Don’t let familiarity dull your observer’s ability to look carefully at what is actually going on past the obvious part.
- Don’t forget to observe how the context of observed activities affects the activities.
- Don’t subsume significant individuals under general group descriptions
- Don’t interpret what you see before the data has been fully collected
Looking at primary sources when doing research on a place: news articles, old photographs, records, etc.
With primary sources, you can look and make your own assessments and reflections about the information you’re seeing but since it’s a picture it’s hard to get a lot of information out of it and you don’t have a base of information that another person is giving you to work with.
Looking at data and complementing it whit your own thoughts and reflections
Like for Bridge 2 and how I realized that it didn’t make sense to me that the comparisons between neighborhoods were made considering 100% to be the total number of each population and not the number of the two combined. For example when talking about the number of Latinos, in Jackson Heights it’s 23% according to the total, and in Elmhurst, it’s 48%, but considering that Jackson Heights has much more population the number of Latinos is much higher than Elmhurst’s and I could not know that unless I did the math. So I grouped the five neighborhoods touching Jackson Heights and calculated how much the percentages would be according to the total of people there, to find out that Jackson heights has a much higher number of Latinos than all the other neighborhoods. From this exercise, I learned that the information can change a lot or can be perceived in a different way according to the reference point, that’s why I chose to represent both.
Organic Drafting to get the main ideas and structure of a paper by writing sentences into post-its and organizing them.
I didn’t know that this was such a useful tool when writing a paper. I had always worked with post-its but only writing bullet points in them, not full sentences. This helped me get a lot of complete ideas out of my head and when it was time to do a draft of our paper, it was so much easier since I already had full sentences and only needed to join them to create paragraphs.
Note: write an introduction draft before doing this exercise to make it easier to get an idea of an introduction before actually writing the paper and then go back and complete it once the paper is done.
Notes on the readings
- Atmosphere –> it makes you think of the bigger picture surrounding something we want to enhance and how this bigger picture or atmosphere can have a lot of influence on how the viewer perceives the object. As an artist, it shows you that you can manipulate the environment of your piece to enhance or produce a feeling in the viewers and how important that can be in the experience of an art piece. I hadn’t really thought that much about how an atmosphere makes a difference in our perception of life, but I related to the example of the San Francisco fog and that really helped me understand the author’s point of view.
- Importance of physical space –> and the power it has. Kimmelman describes the Wall Street movement and how nothing can replace the power of people taking the streets to protest. He talks about how we underestimate the political power of places and how this has been demonstrated many times in history, like Aristotle and his idea of Polis. He describes the importance of the human voice and gives the example of the “Mic Checks” at Zuccotti Park. A physical space allows people to gather and discover their mutual ideas and interests, and the people’s diversity is what allows the protests to be so powerful. Kimmelman ends by saying that on the ground is where people build an architecture of consciousness.In Chile: No matter how the media presented the situation, the people kept taking the streets and that was something the government wasn’t able to escape from easily. The power of a physical place is so big that more than 1.2 million people gathered on October 30th to protest. People from different socio-economical backgrounds, gender, age, religion, etc. The protests united the Chilean people like nothing had ever done before.
- “The uses of sidewalks: contact” talks about the importance of these public spaces in a city’s social environment and how trivial interactions between people on the sidewalks, cafés, stores, etc, creates a feeling of trust around the neighborhood that is very important for its inhabitants’ sense of safety. She poses that in a neighborhood it exists a balance between the people’s need for privacy and their need for human contact.In neighborhoods that lack sidewalk life, people tend to either isolate themselves or involve a selective group of people in their private life. In a place with sidewalk life, some people become “public characters” in the neighborhood. They become information spots because they’re in contact with a large number of people, they spread the word around the neighborhood contributing to the feeling of togetherness. Finally, she poses that sidewalk life contributes to eliminating segregation and racial discrimination because it unites people in a public way.
- “Design and order in everyday life” talks about the ancient notion that art exists because it helps bring order to human experience and how that might not be applicable in real life. Supposedly art helps bring order to the environment, our thoughts and feelings but when the author interviewed people, they didn’t have much to say about this. Most artworks they kept were meaningful because of the symbolic relationship the owner had with it. Objects related to memories, people, family members or friends.Csikszentmihalyi talks about how these relationships or symbolisms towards objects may vary because of culture, age or gender and how visual stimuli may affect people differently for the same reason. Also, how associations by color or form aren’t necessarily the same in different cultures or for different people. This doesn’t mean that aesthetics doesn’t have something to do with the appreciation of art, it just means that they might be perceived differently.
- Ethnographies –> the definition of an ethnography and the new kind of methods the authors propose to make it more holistic. Dara Culhane talks about human relations and how an ethnography is a methodology for collaborative knowledge-making and also, about the relationship between ethnographers and research participants. She mentions how we articulate artistic practices with an ethnographic methodology in the process of research for a new design and how normal research methods can be strengthened by the use of images and sound recordings. She talks bout the methods conventionally considered for ethnographic research (participant observation, interviewing and analysis of information) and how this new kind of ethnography they propose would also be based on how we acquire knowledge through imagination and creativity.
- Infrastructure –> This chapter made me think about the text by Jane Jacobs, which Klinenberg ends up mentioning. They both talk about how the foundation or infrastructure of society is the ties between people and how we have to get back to that practice in order to solve our society’s problems. It makes me think about how in capitalist societies people don’t trust each other. The upper class holds all the power and the rest of the people suffer the consequences of their actions. No one wants to work with the people to find solutions to public problems and that feeling of mistrust grows until no one believes anymore that the people in power will help. We can see this happening all over the world right now, like for example in Chile.
- Public space –> text from 30 years ago, we see how we have evolved in the subject of public spaces. At the time, it seemed like they were just starting to realize that public spaces are important for the city’s public life and how much it can affect people’s view of the city. Nowadays we have more public spaces but surprisingly still have a long way to go on this subject.
I’ve learned so much during this semester, and it has been a great experience to do work through many stages of research and design with Jackson Heights. Though it was very hard to work with the same theme during most of the semester, after doing Bridge 4, it felt like it was all worth it. I’m very impressed in all I could learn about Jackson Heights during these months by doing the research in steps as we did.
When I took the class I wasn’t very familiarized with the concept of constructed environments and how as designers we can alter someone’s perspective and experience of a space, however with all the readings that were very interesting and complemented the classes and the studio projects very nicely, gave us more insight into the social part of design and spaces and how that affects people, communities, experiences and how it can change the way people interact in them
