Here is a sound-bite version of my PhD Thesis: in 3 minutes!
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My PhD is in the faculty of art and design and I am looking at architecture and participation.
More specifically what the PhD is interested in is conflict as a productive force in the design process.
Why is this important?
Conflict is something that allows us to have real engagements which are passionate and embracing it allows us to have connections between people that are meaningful.
Participation as a field is relatively undeveloped in architecture, with much more development in disciplines of philosophy and sociology, especially political science, urban design and planning, and also in art practice installation art and performance art.
There are many projects in participation but they are limited in theoretical development or connection to a comprehensive understanding of a broad research field.
What I think that understanding about participation more in architecture allows us to do, is to build much more meaningful spaces and environments that are related to people. And by actually incorporating the conflicts that really do occur in everyday life we can make spaces that people want to be in because it belongs to them and they actually feel like it fits their needs. In a bigger way it develops our ways of thinking about public space as lots of little private spaces that overlap and conflict with one another.
As you can see here, this is a one page example from a case study of one of the office fit-out projects we designed and this is one day when we were designing a petal table in a shared office space. We spent one day, that is, we had a timeline, - one of the key principles I’m learning from these collaboration processes and the community was involved face to face working with one another on a project. That actually gave them contact and it gave the decisions we made legitimacy. We built this 1:1 prototype which meant that you actually test something physically, but is means also that you put something forward which is meaningful, which gets away from the conflicts to see if it actually works. And finally we actually got people at the end of the day to cut them and actually make these, powertools and all, which was a really great celebration of the efficiency, us all seeing the final success we had with one another and real time produces legitimacy of that making process and interaction with had together.
The core tools that you need for this is conversation, good food, coloured pencils, scissors and glue, and maybe big patience and perseverance.
This is a very difficult field, often very messy, and it poses a lot of tricky questions for architecture
Over the next two years I’m going to design another few minor and major case studies, to try to find better ways to work and think in this way and more importantly, to communicate what actually happens.
In architecture we often think the point is to be experts that solve conflicts when in fact we should be trying to facilitate people doing it themselves.
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