bensweeting's thoughts

observation on the photographability of things

bensweeting — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 19:03:28 +0200

I was looking briefly at some images in a sunday newspaper magazine today. They were advertisements I think, probably for a company that makes furniture or something. They were very stylised interiors and made colourful, well composed images. (Of course they were completely unlivable, but that wasn't the point, it was advertising). It reminded me of the 'it photgraphs well' line about buildings and the longstanding importance of how well a building can be portrayed in an image at, maybe, the expense of how good it actually is.

The other day I was in a restaurant in a big group and at one point almost everyone was photographing each other. I wonder if the recent tendency to photograph every moment makes it more relevant and important that buildings look good in photographs as this is now part of how they are actually used rather than just how they are publicised.

www.avatarlondon.org

bensweeting — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 01:15:12 +0100

http://www.avatarlondon.org/

New website online showing some of things going on at UCL under the AVATAR banner.

"The Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research Laboratory was founded in September 2004 at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. By 2004 many teachers and students at the Bartlett were working with some aspects of virtuality but the full scope of the research was often contained within the hermetic unit system. AVATAR is conceived as a cross unit research group and agenda that explores all manner of digital and visceral terrain, its augmentation and symbiosis..."

the olympics

bensweeting — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 14:34:46 +0100

The olympics, the 2012 version of which is steadily taking shape near to me in east london, seems a very funny thing from a design point of view. Its a regular event requiring more or less the same infrastructure every four years yet we never re-use anything - we just leave expensive under-used stadia dotted around in the name of 'regeneration'. Why "spending half a billion pounds to end up with a second-rate athletics stadium marooned in yuppy housing developments in the Lower Lea Valley" (Gordon MacLaren http://www.asd-realtime.org/2007/11/17/spectacle/ ) is regeneration beats me. The stadium we are getting is at least modest but it is still commercially unsustainable and hasn't been designed with a shared end-user in mind like the commonwealth games stadium in manchester. The 'legacy' of the stadium seems to be a like-for-like replacement of the aethletics facility at crystal palace.

Why does the olympics have to move around? Surely only in terms of it as a financial spectacle. It would be just as good if it was in Greece every year and maybe it would even build up more character. Alternatively why haven't we designed a reusable stadium that could be reassembled in different cities.? Or a giant olympic ship..?

There seems something wrong with the amount of waste this event creates by starting from scratch every 4 years.

designing-for-others

bensweeting — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 03:56:31 +0100

In designing things for others we can’t possibly avoid interfering with other people’s lives as the things we design form part of the framework in which people live; that is, intervening in people’s lives is rather the point.

That we intervene in the lives of others is, I think, ethically problematic although unavoidable. Designers have reacted to this dilemma in a number of ways.

One approach, which we might call Total Design, has the designer taking total responsibility and designing the whole environment or imposing a particular utopian proposal. I find this ethically undesirable but it is often aesthetically successful. I guess there’s something which is often aesthetically pleasing about one idea carried through completely.

The other extreme we might call The Market. This is where the designers just give people what they want. This might be Disneyland, Redrow homes, design-by-committee or just following economic or marketing trends. This, at first sight, seems more ethically acceptable but really it is an abdication of the responsibilities of a designer – the designer might as well not be there. This abdication of responsibility is an ethical failure to add to the aesthetic mediocrity of The Market.

I think most designers occupy a ground between these two extremes. We tend to use drawings to have a conversation between designer and designed-for.

The difficulty with this is there are often so many stakeholders in a design that we can’t talk to or consult with all of them. Often we might only really talk to whoever has commissioned us. This is more or less fine for say a domestic extension but for a residential development we clearly miss something if we just talk to the client who might be the developer because he is not the end user. The developer has, needless to say, a very different set of concerns to the end user (who might not even be known).

In reaction to the multitude of stakeholders (the client, the user, the passer by…) designers have developed different ways of involving them – either in the designing of the proposal (e.g. participative design) or actually in the proposal (e.g. interactive architecture).

Are some of these different approaches to designing-for-others valid in different situations?
Or is there some ideal balance we should all aim at?
How can involving stakeholders within designing avoid the perils of The Market?

Telling Places: Narrative and Identity in Art and Architecture

bensweeting — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 03:54:28 +0100

Please find below the details of an upcoming conference at the Bartlett: http://www.tellingplaces.co.uk/

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Telling Places: Narrative and Identity in Art and Architecture

The annual PhD research conference Research Spaces, has been running since 2004, affording post-graduates at the Bartlett School of Architecture, and the Slade School of Fine Art, the opportunity to examine research activities across disciplines. The event has continued to be a success, attracting contributions from the UK, Europe and North America, from practicing architects and artists, academics and research students.

4-5 December 2007, Woburn Studios, University College London, UK
http://www.tellingplaces.co.uk/