fJohn has 23 post(s)

Below is a list of collaborative methods that I’ve been compiling. It may be of use as the nature of our collaboration broadens in this next week.

Back and forth: Limited number of participants (2 ideally), with everyone shaping it in an ongoing and iterative way. One person working, then passing to next.

Crowd-sourced: One person asks, people in other places satisfy that ask. Best result(s) used.

Active hand-off: One person designs, then hands to the next person

Passive hand-off: One person designs, leaves the design, another person chooses to pick it up

Parallel play: All doing same task alongside each other. Pick from results or combine results

Perpendicular play: All doing a different projects alongside each other. Ideas rub off.

Group share: One larger task is done by multiple people at the same time in the same space.

Group split: One larger task is broken up into smaller tasks then recombined or synthesized. Larger task may be known (have been planned out) or unknown (needs to be discovered)

I love Kilgallen’s way of thinking about signs and how they bring forth human personality when simply made.

Pick one spot in the city and begin to think of it as yours. It doesn’t matter where, and it doesn’t matter what. A street corner, a subway entrance, a tree in the park. … Go to to your spot every day at the same time. Spend an hour watching everything that happens to it, keeping track of everyone who passes by or stops or does anything there. Take notes, take photographs. Make a record of these daily observations and see if you learn anything about the people, or the place, or yourself”
“The Rules of the Game,” Paul Auster to Sophie Calle

Let’s play by Paul Auster’s rules. Choose one of the 50 spots on Providence’s “Independence Trail” as your spot. The historic significance of the Independence Trail only serves as a note of possible contrast with what you will see in today’s Providence.

Experimenting with the following recording techniques, create an exhaustive amount of documentation of your site. Note the word exhaustive might produce a range of materials or you may find that certain means of documenting your observations most useful. Notes may work better than images in some places or cases (nighttime). Be sure to spend a good deal of time not recording anything at all. A recording is often the result of seeing. Using what you’ve learned in the lecture, the readings and in the in-class activity, look to synthesize and communicate various formal and conceptual aspects of the place.

• Photography
• Diagrams
• Sketches
• Lists
• Narrative paragraph
• Sound recordings
• Video
• iPhone apps?

Present your findings to your classmates in section at the start of class next week in an organized fashion. Pin up what can be pinned up, have a laptop out for digital assets, make sketches visible, etc. Lead your classmates through your observations and at least five observations that you took away from the experience. Address this line of questioning: What do you notice? What did you decide to share? What tools did you use the most and why?

Each student will have about 3-4 minutes to summarize their findings. Everyone should be set up by the beginning of class.

This one week unit meant to kickstart best practices and ongoing forms that you will use in the next two years. Buy and begin using a sketchbook (letter-sized or smaller), set up a blog (specifically for this class, not Instagram or Pinterest… tumblr is ideal) and begin to reflect and document your experiences in a way that will make your final documentation go smoothly.