Ammon Beyerle

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.

A

The concept of Urban Interior offers something to my research, namely opening the concept of ecologies with another definer: interiority.

The starting point for participatory design is that all situations in which design interrogates are existing, functioning and thick. The process of engagement thus needs to delve into, to build relationship with, understand and manage environmental affects and propose. Indeed, products of participatory architecture are propositions, they are prototypes for implementation, adaption and rejection. In a process of prototypical proposition, there is no object, but a set of intersubjective relationships with and without the architecture. The product of architecture must meet with identified and latent systems of everyday life, and necessarily be defined by it contingently. The question becomes not how is the architecture occupied, but how does the architecture occupy, and what does that occupation do? The intervention of architecture thus becomes an actor in a field of relationships, taking on relational types – aggressor /defender, container / magnet, agonist / antagonist / ally.

It needs to be conceived that architecture can function as an objectified space, or similarly an occupied space with its own set of atmospheric conditions and effects. Undertaking architecture necessarily creates a particular interior, a position which brings about identities and conceptions of environments. The practice of architecture is as much a device for finding-out as it is a communication, or social communion.

Without a sense of prejudice, the binary inside/outside provides a theoretical mechanism of control, be in at least prototypical in nature. The proposal, and making of the proposal presents an opportunity to synthesise, construct a reality, to build. The occupation of that proposal, as an interior sets up the possibility for home base, be it a place to leave from, retreat to, avoid, work in or relax in, it is a constructed place of meaning and being.

A less-participatory design process preconceives an interior as a given before investigation. It assumes a situation and summarily the environmental conditions which are ‘in’-terior and thus, which are ‘out’ – ‘ext’-terior. Its purposes are more predefined, and thus, outcomes are controlled. The context of a less-participatory design process is transcendental, evident in the self referential conditions for its innovation, be they stakeholder limited (with defined interests and ‘needs analysis’) or in closed indexical positioning within the architectural-establishment. The latter condition is generally considered award-worthy architecture, the former, ‘engineering’ and best-practice delivery (with associated systematised processes and assessment critieria). A less-participatory design process conjures its control a priori. A simple metaphor for a less-participatory design process is the petri dish. The petri dish is a controlled paradigm, its relationships are necessarily transcendental only. This could relate to ‘high-theory’, with strong axioms and generalised rules. The architecture is the specimen of the process; the site is the specimen of inquiry, with a controlled laboratory established first-hand. This has obvious benefits in terms of budgeting, planning, risk management and time constraints. It is a laboratory of control, aim, method, outcome. The world is outside with a definable distinction to an inanimate inside.

A maximum-participatory design process does not preconceive an interior. Assumptions are formulated in the undertaking of the project and can continually change, the environmental conditions develop and are absolutely contingent, both as situation and effect; exterior becomes both what has not yet occurred, or what has already occurred. Synthesis is left for present situation or theoretical steps forward. The context of participatory design process is always in the world, transcendentality only occurs in terms of temporary lapses in time (like the charette, the prototype, the incubator, the test,  the workshop), evident in the need to develop shared principles and necessitate their constant review, need to defined values and purpose, whilst conditions for creativity are rarely closed – ideas can come from anywhere and anyone at any time. Indeed, there is a transparent relationship between the development of a product, and the production of ideas (unlike the less-participatory counterpart).  This can be difficult and tiring at times, though it necessitates a depth of contingency that only breeds more and more relevance – or shall we say ‘situation’. Solutions come from anywhere, they are of different scale and grandeur depending on the situation, may they be interpersonal, physical, time or task orientated, or even fleeting, hyperspecific and procedural. A simple metaphor is the ecology. Imagine a wetland with a thousand organisms, large and small, upstream and downstream, chemical processes from contamination to production, categorisation of different parts and interdependent relationships, weather comes in and the scientist (architect) is a contaminating alien. The control of the ecology is without the architect, and the relationships within it are infinitely explorable and alive. Interventions in this ecology bring about wicked problems, theoretical propositions can only be ‘low theory’ – particularly contingent, and with no promise of inter-operability or translation beyond the system. To understand one must poke, squat down and look, watch, push in or pull out. The world is everywhere. Any sense of exterior can only be the philosophical antithesis of this way of working, but even this is a contingent paradigm. All action in this fundamentally ‘inside’ is ‘part of’ and contingent.

As well as thinking about how we conceive space, it must be said that relationships are the enablers of construction.
How a designer constructs and maintains a relationship in a project has a direct affect on the outcome, both as an occupation and an artifact. This might then suggest the role of communication in the design process, not as a technical tool, but a relationship management tool. The early design crit, the briefing sessions, the consultation with stakeholders has something to do with developing connections between people. They are environments to found relationships and develop them.
In this way the design process can be seen as a resource or fuel for production of a relationship, and thence one sees the potential for community building, or simply team building.
There is a need to better understand what is the real value of a team atmosphere beyond implicit expectations, however it is generally accepted that what produces a thing by many people is the conception of a team, whether it be antagonistic or agonistic, connections between participating parts will assemble a thing both through their own assemblage point, or tunnel of perception, and through the environment in which they connect, or culture.
So if we are assuming the role of the social in making things:
What is social?