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Andrew_Kao_week5

As the end of our seminar approaches I find myself thinking about the beginning. The goals we set and the hopes we chose to pursue. The past few weeks have informed me about gardening, and more importantly about the sense of home and the memories it can help create and help sustain. If anything, the interviews and the time we spent with the MRC and its members really gave me a concrete basis for the power of gardening. As an immigrant myself, I have a few family members who actively garden. In each case the primary focus is to plant and, hopefully, harvest crops indigenous to Sri Lanka, fruits and vegetables that are hard find here in the United States. But our time with the MRC really highlighted that the crops were in essence secondary. What was really been cultivated was a sense of home.

All the MRC members I interacted with had that sense of home when talking about “their” garden. The community gardens we visited reflected this. Perhaps not with a wealth of participants all diligently attending to their plots all at the same time, but more in the sense that for each of them, it is “their” garden. There is an important distinction there, many of the MRC members are renters, but their garden is their own. There is an inherent ownership and connection between garden and gardener and it will be up to us to convey that message, of how gardens can strengthen a person’s sense of being part of a community. It can be argued that not every community garden might have the emotional significance of the MRC plots, but that might be an oversimplification. It will be up to us to share and inform those who, like us, had only a vague conceptual idea about what a community garden can be.

If the purpose of CRP, landscape architecture, and architecture is to help create a better built environment, whether it be in the scale of a building, community, or city, then we must begin to question the investments we choose to make within the city. If “community” is the endgame that idea of the community and the city must be accessible to as many members as possible, or at the very least, there should be an openness to the community as a whole. It is not up to me to determine if urban farming and community gardens are the best use of city resources in the efforts to foster a better sense of community, but at least in the MRC’s case, it appears to truly empower people to have a sense of community as well as a means of adjusting to a new life.

Ideally we would all like to share what we have learned these last few weeks, but it will be a challenge to convey the breath of what we have all learned. But as Sandercock mentions, “stories are a common denominator valued by all ethnicities and ages,” and perhaps that should be our focus. Not the data we gather or the metrics we might find, but the human connection. A story can transcend language, time, age groups, and communities. It is why the news is always presented as stories. Human beings have an underlying affinity for stories. It is how we have defined our existence on this planet and will continue to be the dominant medium in which we choose to record our time here. If we are able to do anything with our time with the MRC then it should be to help share their story. To help at least one of a hundred who may come into contact with their story to ask the question of, “how can I help?”

Urban farming on flood plain areas and community garden expansion will ultimately be determined by the city, but we might be able to shed some light on the work that goes on with the MRC and its members. Maybe that leads to more plots and less people on the waitlist, but at least there will be another form of documentation about what is going on within this city, its not all music festivals and “keep Austin weird,” there are communities defining themselves and work being done invisible to the rest of us, important work. No matter the medium, we should strive to share this story; it is a compelling story, a story about hope, hard work, and kindness. It is a story about people helping one another, and those need to be the stories we all need to be seeing and hearing more.

- Andrew Kao - Week5

JoyceHanlon_Week4

Hanqi Li_Week 4

One article that is truly inspiring is Design Thinking . It helps me to rethink my thinking model as a designer. I have a background as a project management student (with 2 years of engineering education), which brought me a thinking pattern that focuses mostly on how to fulfill the given goals, and cut the budget and the time in the project at the same time. This thinking pattern makea me feel constantly confused when I see the way architecture students addressing a problem.

On earlier weeks in this PID studio I was feeling the same way. I was questioning myself in my mind that why we don’t start to collect flood hydraulic data from watershed department and ask how many plot would fulfill MRC’ need, and then start design immediately.

When reading this article I realized I was still using engineering's way of thinking. (Professor Coker once dubbed this kind of thinking as "tunnel vision"). It helps to solve a problem, but this linear solution often fails to address or solve a problem in its most efficient and innovative mode. Like the quote in the article pointed out, “…Henry Ford understood this when he said, ‘If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said 'a faster horse.'" A pure engineer’s vision might end up "breeding the fastest race horse on earth", but inventing automobile relies on thinking as an innovative problem solver, which is exactly the role that the author imagines a designer should play.

The article also interpret the effect of interview as catalyst for inspirations. Like I mentioned on last week's response, during the interview, people may simply want an increment of current situation. However, designer would interpret the requests as possibilities to achieve a goal more than functional fulfillment.

After the reading I feel the need to evaluate the interview in a new way. Kristen, Andrew and I did a successful interview with Watanka. During the interview we actually started with working with him. Being close to the interviewee make him feel less stressful. When working together I actually asked some of the question we prepared. But in the formal part of the interview, after reading the verbal consent, it took several minutes to let the atmosphere get casual again. Watanka is a cheerful person and I am delighted to see that he start a new life quickly -- even this new life is much busier than his earlier years (according to the interview). This also raise the question of how fast refugees can adapt new lifestyles. Young people usually have advantages.

Despite the amount of information I got in the interview, I think it is important to learn to apply the thinking model in the article, inorder to interpret the dialog in a way more inspiring.

Andrew_Kao_week4

Approaching this week’s entry I find myself thinking about application. Last week had us visiting Green Gate Farm’s Austin location and then on Saturday we had our first round of official interviews. Both came at an important point of the class, studio has us winding up on researching and mapping, we have a site (of sorts), and technically we have a more defined direction to move towards. This weekend had me thinking about capturing an interview, and possibly more importantly, capturing the sense of the interviewee and their story. The end of this week will determine the successes, failures, and lessoned learned, but there is a sense that we are all beginning to filter your visits now with a more focused and analytic lens.

The videography has me thinking about all that is said and all that needs to be done, each interviewee has brought up several points that could use design solutions but it will be up to us to make choices and hopefully focus on the most beneficial issues. What we place are focus on now, and what we take from the visits, conversations, research, and interviews will determine the future of our project this semester, and I find myself thinking about balance and focus. The Mills and Harris’s case study on the Austin Resource Center for the Homeless, addresses the balance we have to manage as we move forward in this course and studio. While the sustainability triangle will be present in our PID work this semester, as with any responsible practice of architecture and design, we will also have to navigate our own triangle. In this case the three points will be the city of Austin/Edwin Marty, MRC/Green Gate Farms, and UTSOA /our education.

Paying proper attention to each point will determine the effectiveness of what we propose in the end and hopefully we will be able to make the proper decisions to addresses the most pressing issues as efficiently as possible without skewing our triangles. We will also need to design a solution that really helps a situation. If Public Interest Design is truly a cyclical process that makes the public’s interest paramount then we must look to follow the “Design thinking” methodology that Brown & Wyatt speak of, to “…addresses the needs of the people who will consume a product or service and the infrastructure that enables it.” If the MRC is to be our focus, then we must seek to really listen and address their actual needs, as opposed to our “perception” of them.

There is a saying in the movies, “we’ll just fix it in post,” “post” is shorthand for post production, the part of the movie that comes back from filming and is edited, color corrected, audio synced, and at which point special effects and captioning happens. But this process can be infinitely more difficult if the filmmaker does not take the end result into consideration, how shot are taken, movement of the camera, framing, how shots connect to one another, how much surrounding film should be taken. It all boils down to what to focus on and what to pay attention to. If not enough attention gets paid during the planning and filming process then the more difficult it will be in the end, with editing.

“One of the biggest impediments to adopting design thinking is simply fear of failure. The notion that there is nothing wrong with experimentation or failure, as long as they happen early and act as a source of learning, can be difficult to accept” (Brown & Wyatt). I am sure we are all wondering about making the right choices as we go forward. I am sure we all have some form of “anticipated finding” we hope to prove right, but we must not be too careful, a little leap of faith goes a long way. Sometimes it helps to let the camera roll a bit, you might find get nothing but wasted film, but sometimes your might just see something that works perfectly that you never even considered.

-Andrew Kao - Week 4

Sean_O’Brien_Week4

Amy_Grossman_Week4

This weekend I was talking about PID and what we’ve been doing and my friend (and cohort in landscape arch) asked why we are taking so many field trips. Even though she is in the London studio and spent an entire week in a field trip for her project, she was surprised by how many gardens and farms we have been to. I’ll admit that at times I struggle to remember if type x container was at this garden or that garden.

In the Perkes article, A Useful Practice, they describe how the Gulf Coast Community Design Studio lists “experience” as one of their three values, which also include proximity and service. They define experience as “the value that energizes a useful practice” and distinguish between the concepts of expertise and experience. Expertise, the trait that most people assume is needed to practice, are the “uncommon skills and specialized abilities that set one person apart from others” while experience is “skills and knowledge that come from commonly shared events or activities that form and strengthen human relationships around those activities.”

Experiencing the gardens and farms through these field trips has been immeasurably more informative towards my thoughts and ideas than any set of internet guided cases studies which are used by most studios to inform ourselves and create expertise in a subject.

In addition to the simple fact that we are all experiencing these agricultural settings is that we are doing it as a group. I have tended my own gardens or volunteered at farms as an individual or in completely different group contexts, but there is a difference between recounting my own memory of a time unrelated to someone else and remembering a scene with someone who was also there and being able to tease apart the different elements of how those could contribute to our goals as a class and to our relationship with the MRC. I think the “commonly shared events” is an important phrase in the article’s definition of experience.

We have talked a bit in class about the trap of white privilege and how to avoid it, and I think these garden experiences aid in that. We are literally getting our hands dirty alongside the refugees and sharing the experience of how to interact with a garden. I realize it would be hard to do this logistically, but I think it would be neat to be paired up with a refugee for a few hours and work alongside them. If we were designing a garden, this could take the communal experience to the next level and truly inform our designs in a way that expertise would not. When we interviewed Hikmat, he was so happy to share his thoughts and joys about gardening with us, I could see that he wanted to also share his skills.

#amy grossman #pidseminar2015 #week 4 #useful practice

JoyceHanlon_Week3

Butaro Hospital, Rwanda - MASS Design Group

Funded by support from the Clinton Foundation

Week 3 - Maps, paths, Certeau, and MRC engagement

I really like maps. Really, really like them. Although I haven’t used the phrase “erotic of knowledge” before, it seems apt (I recommend www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/ or https://www.flickr.com/groups/desire_paths/pool/with/10177232556/).

Something about the view of a city from above is thrilling, and I like to think that I enjoy it not as the imaginary warden of a massive Panopticonic prison, but because rising out of the street gives me a chance to see the writing of the streets, the curves and ligatures of an unknown author; if it’s an ancient map, the odd ligatures and unpredictable bends suggest a city built out of immediate ground level needs, born of proximal and practical consideration, not of a concept of the city ordered by an overarching plan, like endless grids of paneláky in former Communist-bloc cities (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panel%C3%A1k). It’s not hard to read into them as stories of unfolding histories, with their own lacunae to be filled in with imaginations, projections, etc. This way of seeing the world, and as a method of design, is at a scale that is beyond the scope of our PID engagement, but there are useful critiques of planning and design that can be taken from Certeau’s writing.

Certeau describes the defiance in enunciative practices of urbanity in a way that inverts structures of order, out of view of the administrators of vertical visual utopias inspired by “fictions of knowledge”. In our case, it seems responsible to, first of all, be wary of impositions of order derived from false, utopic, or myopic knowledges, and secondly, to accept that the consequences of our design choices as a collaborative group will almost certainly result in some unintended consequences, and that our audience, our users/practitioners at “ground level” will have their own style of engagement with whatever we build them. Although I don’t think this precludes mapping excercises, I think direct observation of participants and questions about desires, intents, technical abilities and skills related to farming will prove to be most valuable during the first phase of interviewing. I would be particularly interested to ask about MRC participants memories of farming, as far back as their memory permits, about what their experiences were, as well as asking if they were interested in a particular farming technique that for one reason or another wasn’t possible to undertake here. I agree with Amin and Fisher’s points that a secluded, artificially stratified or separated society can stifle creativity, progress, and ultimately survival, and in having a diverse group of co-designers in our MRC partners, we have access to a broad base of knowledges; being aware of the condition described by Fisher -“never before have we had so much data and so little understanding”- our path into the design and construction of the project will call for more of what Coleman described this morning as “reflective” thinking, a poesis or praxis that brings something new, yet “universal”, something that embodies both beauty and goodness, and (hopefully) usefulness to the community we are serving.

#jeffelliott

Festival Beach Visit

If this last visit proved anything about the process I am following in regards to our interaction, data gathering, and response to the MRC participants is that that human factor is lacking. If film is the route I wish to pursue in order to help share a narrative about the MRC, their participants, and the work that is done, then those involved in each aspect must be seen.

Towards the end of the visit I captured an MRC user watering his garden, I asked him if it would be ok and he smiled and was very welcoming. The language gap was so evident that I could not even ask his name. But I was able to speak to him about his garden. This was by far more powerful than any of the film I captured simply moving through the garden. When speaking with Adolfi, the lady from the Congo we all spoke with extensively, I realized that the video of her speaking would have been immensely helpful. The fact that we needed an interpreter in order to converse with her exposed the hole that only audio recordings will bring, we lose Adolfi, since it not her voice what we will be hearing. Simply seeing her interact with her plants and show us the successes and failures of her garden was extremely insightful and really helped show the connection that is made between the garden and its gardener. Also, getting shown someone’s work always brings one closer to the work and its author, and so I find myself wishing I had captured the interaction to share with the viewers that would not be able to converse with Adolfi if they walk into the garden on any given day, when an interpreter was not present.

Of the comments made on my last assignment the biggest observation was the lack of the “people” within the visit. Approaching the second revision I chose to focus on the moving image instead of the single frame photographs, but by the end of the visit I found myself replaying the interactions that I did not capture. Film is a difficult process especially in a documentation centric focus. I found myself choosing to capture what I could when I was able to, realizing that the focus of this visit was our participation and interaction with the MRC, and the Festival Beach Garden Community and not necessarily the documentation of what we did as a class. If the film approach is the avenue I chose to pursue further down the road then I acknowledge the fact that filming will have to be my primary focus, with one-on-one interaction being focused on the interview and interviewee, with addition footage being shot specifically to be coupled with and support the narratives and stories brought forth by the MRC members.

The biggest argument against documentary film is the author can directly influence the narrative regardless of the subjects. This bending of the actual is addressed by Heron and Reason with the idea of research “with” rather than “on, ” ideally “with” is the ultimate goal we strive toward, and I truly believe that presenting the MRC members on film would help to show this extremely well, but it will depend heavily on their comfort level with cameras and the manner in which the filming environment is staged. At the very lease we will be able to show the joy that the MRC members seem to have in showing us their gardens. But as with all “documentation” we must be mindful of the narratives we create, by how and what we document. As Douglas Harper’s article on the visual discusses the ethics of actually capturing a community or an action, and the authenticity of the images taken, if filming is the final product then we must be extremely mindful in how we capture it. Ideally we would not have cameras to do the information gathering, but some sort of invisible capturing system, since it is true that people do then to react to the presence of a camera. It will be how comfortable we make the interviewee that will determine the success of the film we take. The questions of documentation “with,” “on,” and “ethical obligations” will directly effect the manner in which I chose to film the MRC and its members, and the question of whether is even possible will have to determined. But if nothing else, the need to show the participants interacting with their gardens has been made abundantly clear.

-Andrew Kao

Week 3

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rld0KDcan_w)

#certainlycerteau

#frequentlyfisheresque

New floodplain studies indicate revised flood risks for several Austin watersheds, affecting thousands of properties

Some follow-up info from Edwin’s talk this morning. (*Including “Barriers to and Opportunities for Commercial Urban Farming: Case Studies from Austin, Texas and New Orleans, Louisiana”)

Top-Down.

The field of architecture experienced a lot of change in the last 50 years as technology vastly developed. When computer aided drafting came onto the scene, architecture firms that traditionally did all of their drafting by hand had to make adjustments. Now today, most firms have adopted AutoCAD into their repertoire, but are struggling now with the creation of 3D modeling programs and BIM. For the past two summers I worked for an architecture/engineering firm back home in Maine, and the integration of these more technologically advanced design tools was a major point of contention in the office.

The dominant opinion in the office was in favor of total integration of the new software: eliminating AutoCAD from the workflow entirely and working almost exclusively in Revit. This side of the argument preached for progress and highlighted the potential benefits for the coordination between A and E departments. This opinion contained most of the heavy decision makers as well as the population of the staff “under 30 years of age.” On the other hand, the divergent opinion in the office was in favor of no change: drafting in AutoCAD and doing any 3D modeling in Google SketchUP. Mostly this group, made up of the “over 30 years of age” population, were unfamiliar with the software and not up to the challenge of learning a new tool. If things were working as is, then why change?

Despite the divergent opinion, inevitably the decision makers-the design Principles and CEO—exercised their authority by beginning the transition to Revit. However, they did so in a way that attempted to address the concerns of unfamiliarity and difficulty. They began by hiring a “Revit expert,” who would be a paid source of knowledge for the current employees and could pick up slack on difficult modeling tasks. Then they implemented Revit training sessions, so employees could learn to use the new tool properly in a more formal setting. And lastly in monthly meetings, they would show exemplary projects done in Revit in order to get the staff on board and enthusiastic about the potentials of the switch.

While the majority of the staff embraced the change, there were still a few members of the divergent opinion who were not cooperative. These few people would start negative conversations behind the decision makers’ backs, blaming them for any extra work it created, criticize others on board with the change, say rude things about the new employee hired to help them, continue to use AutoCAD and SketchUP, or use Revit in such a way that collaboration was near impossible. My opinion-which has very little weight as an intern—is that the decision makers did what was right for the company to survive in a competitive and ever-changing field, and that these few people who overly exercised their right to voice opinions were doing so for selfish reasons and did not have the best intentions for the company.

-Katie Clark

The Viewpoint From Here

Within maybe the last seven years, the city of Austin proposed an adjustment to the intersection of Lakewood Drive and 2222 near my parent’s house. The plan was to elevate 2222 as it crossed over Bull Creek to get it out of the flood plain and in so doing, would temporarily close one of two primary entrances out of the neighborhood on the west side. I was in high school at the time and did not attend the community meetings but it became evident that the homeowners nearest the intersection saw an opportunity to permanently close what they considered to be a dangerous and/or unpleasantly busy street. They were also concerned that the slope of the new intersection would exacerbate speeding traffic that used their street to bypass traffic on 2222.

I remember tuning in to channel six in order to see the live feed from city hall where residents on both sides of the issue petitioned their agendas to council members. The turnout was impressive for an issue that seemed, at least to me, initially benign. What struck me about the dissenting opinions toward the project were their hostile attitudes to perceived outsiders using their street to get to another neighborhood. From my own observations, I would consider an overwhelming majority of that through traffic to be residents of the same community, but it is interesting how the perceived boundaries of geography can quickly change depending on your agenda. In the end, the issue of safety was the breaking factor for the opposing argument. The fire station located less than a mile down 2222 would be forced to travel a considerably longer distance in order to accommodate the closing of the intersection in question.

Today, the reconfiguration of the intersection stands as initially planned and there is probably something to be said about the dissenting residents’ concerns regarding speeding down the new incline, but I am not sure there was a way to possibly appease both sides in this case. I actually realize now, that this is probably not a fantastic case study for this assignment… While this project was certainly emotionally charged, it would be incorrect to fault the city in terms of their engagement process. Both sides were well informed of the issue and had plenty of time to react. Residents on both sides of the issue were effective in reaching out to the rest of the neighborhood for input and additional representation. While one side clearly lost their objective, their viewpoints were given equal consideration at city hall. Another reason why I now realize this case study is relevant but irrelevant; this project, while technically a means to economic interest through increased efficiency, also had within it the health and safety of a community in mind. In that sense, any oversight in regards to speeding today can be attributed to a wholly well-meaning group (the city), rather than a reckless and self-serving private developer. Not to say that cities cannot be reckless and self-serving per the trolley article or the 1920 master plan here in Austin, but in this case the ‘self’ was in direct relation to the neighborhood which this was impacting.

-Danny Montalvo

Good Intentions

(I am not positive that this exactly answers all of the questions in the prompt, but I wanted to provide an example of how even people with the absolute best of intentions can still have oversights)

I had a group of friends in DC who ran a queer blog and wanted to start throwing parties. Everyone in this group saw themselves as, and were active in pursuing, being inclusive of all members of this community. People of any and all gender identities, races, income levels, ages, sexual orientations, etc. were welcome, and, in some cases, specific language was used to convey this goal. The group of organizers themselves was a diverse group with members falling all along the spectrum of the above identities. It was perhaps this very fact that contributed to the failure to acknowledge divergent opinions – there were so many divergent opinions within this dominant group that it was hard to consider that there could be even more.

In any event, the group selected a venue for the party. They did not ask other party promoters or a selection of people who would probably attend for any suggestions. Instead, they landed on a venue that was well located, and, most significantly, was available to use for free. They continued planning the event from there, a few weeks later held the party, and walked away from the night feeling like it had been a huge success. They had a great time, their friends had a great time, and the venue had worked out well (and been profitable). In the days that followed, it became apparent that not everyone felt so positively. By choosing the venue without doing much research, they had chosen a location with a staff that was actually not supportive of the queer community. Multiple people felt as though they had been harassed at the party (in particular those who were visibly identifiable as queer), and others felt that the venue was missing some basic requirements of a safe space for our community (non-gendered restrooms, for example).

People felt that their experiences and concerns had been given less priority than others, specifically others who had more privilege within the community. Luckily, in this instance there was a specific place for people to bring these issues to the organizers’ attention, and people posted on both the blog and social media platforms with their concerns. Some people pointed out that it had been entirely irresponsible on the organizers’ part to not have been more careful in selecting a venue (it was). Others acknowledged their good intentions, and that the party had been successful in some ways, but asked that the organizers do better for the community in the future. Although hard to swallow the criticism that despite their best attempts they had still fallen short in some ways, the organizers agreed that they needed to improve for future events.

This issue is, in a lot of ways, still not resolved. They have thrown many more parties since that first one and have received just as much feedback in that time. As recently as last week, they agreed to have a town hall meeting with people who had specific issues they wanted to discuss regarding decisions made about and at the parties. But, this group continues to have the support (and friendship) of all of their critics because of their continued effort to listen to and act on feedback. It is certainly not easy to hear criticism, and it is even harder to not feel like it is a personal attack, but this experience has proved that is a critical part of having more than good intentions.

-Sarah Wassel

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