This project is based on Alison’s research into the geographies of UK military airspaces. These spaces are hidden zones of military control and power projection. They are used by the UK’s military air forces to train for combat situations. Their use is controlled by the Civil Aviation Authority, which oversees the management of these spaces and creates the UK air charts, which depict the uses that airspaces can be put to. One of the fascinating things about these airspaces is that they exist in four dimensions; they are three-dimensional volumes of space that can be activated at different times. However, aviators only have two-dimensional air charts to look at to ‘see’ these spaces, so they have to be able to translate these mappings into three-dimensions in their minds to be able to fly safely.
The idea behind this project was to creatively use interviews conducted by Alison with a number of UK military aviators as a starting point from which we could question the nature of UK airspaces. One of the aims of these interviews was to uncover the hidden geographies of these spaces. This centred upon discussions on how these users perceive and imagine the complex geometries of the spaces through which they fly. Most significantly, these interviews illustrated the extent to which airspaces are enacted through the movement of aircraft through them. In this project we are interested in exploring how this renders airspace as performed, with the mechanical and human elements of aviation enacting individual airspaces. These ideas developed into the foci of this project, which are about making these invisible airspaces visible to a broad audience, enabling this expert knowledge to be more widely accessible to non-experts, and illustrating the performances that enact airspaces.
This project seeks to make the spaces through which aircraft fly visible. It achieves this through the construction of a vertical object that empowers us to enact control of these spaces.
During the early years of aviation aircraft flew at relatively low altitudes. However, laws existed that gave landowners ownership of the entirety of the vertical space above the footprint of their house, including the air. This led to a myriad of problems for aviators and landowners who became locked in legal battles over payment for access to these spaces.
More recently, wind farms have become a contentious issue. Environmentalists seemingly either protest their building in areas of natural beauty, or cry out for their erection to reduce our dependence of fossil fuels and nuclear power. The aviation community, however, dislikes wind farms because their production of radar white noise creates ‘no fly-zones’ in the air.
This project synthesises these ideas, to propose an activism approach that focuses upon the idea of being able to generate and activate your own airspace though the deployment of a personalised wind farm. The project involves the creation of both the wind farm and an audio locator. The locator amplifies the sound of an aircraft engine, which enables the wind farm owner to hear an aircraft at a distance and erect the wind farm in time to prevent the aircraft flying overhead. This creates a form of mechanical imperialism by enabling the control of an individual airspace.
Can airspaces be owned and activated by the public? What is the size of the airspace you can own? How can we employ wind farms in a way that disrupts conventional understandings of their use?
The weekend before Lent, the city of Oruro (Bolivia) is the setting for its most awaited celebration: a danced Carnival parade.
Carnival was imported from Spain with the conquest of the Andes and was juxtaposed over existing indigenous rituals marking the start of the potato harvest. One can still discern different cultural backgrounds present, as seen in the ritual burning of offerings, or the oath to the Virgin of Candlemas that Carnival dancers make for the parade.
Spanish authorities founded the town of Oruro in 1606 after the ‘discovery’ of silver deposits near a mountain range sacralised by local people. The city’s growth was fuelled by the mining trade. During Carnival, enslaved indigenous miners danced as a way to thank Andean deities and the Virgin Mary for the mineral.
Today, Carnival is no longer fuelled by mining practices after the traders that used to supply the mine with goods – meat, candles and coca leaves – renewed the tradition and gave it a new life. The social composition of its actors has changed radically, including the upper and middle classes, who, since the 1940s, have practically appropriated the celebration, displacing miners and others of lower means.
From this complex cultural landscape, Ximena and Rob decided to focus on making an object to serve a practical purpose. We wanted to acknowledge Carnival’s history and make something for the precarious conditions of the mine.
The concept of ‘light’ was our instigator: dancers refer to faith in the Virgin as a ‘light’ that guides them.
“Dancers look at the Virgin to get strength. On the one hand she has a candle, on the other she has God.” (Priest of Oruro)
Also, a miner’s light is paramount to their safety.
“We have spent unscheduled nights inside the mine’s total darkness.”
(Hector, professional miner)
A guiding light became a miner’s light.
Most silver seams require underground mining. The mine inside San José mountain (Oruro) comprises old pillars and structures, creating passages. The only source of light, the primary source of work and safety, is an attachment on miners’ helmets. The technology available at the Cooperativa Multiactiva Corazón de Jesús was neither long-lasting nor reliable.
Miners descend on a lift which has a tendency to break down and frequently have to spend up to 24 hours underground in a dangerous environment, where dynamite is often used.
As a response to this context, Ximena and Rob developed two proposals for the polar opposites. The first proposal is for Bolivian silver miners, who rely on illumination for work, life and health. The mine provides financial support for the community so efficiency, safety, independence of tools and refurbishment are paramount. Conversations with Cooperativa Multiactiva Corazón de Jesús directed the detailing and function of the object. There are three important design constraints: it must operate in total darkness, be inexpensive to make and repair and give long-lasting illumination.
An illuminating object is conventionally developed to be turned on in an isolated dark environment. User considerations dictate this to be reversed; during any failure or miscomprehension, the object should remain on, illuminating this environment. The mechanical functions are enlarged for gloved workers; an internal switch also allows illuminated battery replacement. The product has been considered to allow self-repair and the notion of remote on-site manufacture has informed the detail, aesthetic and components.
The second proposal is aimed at mass production, the idea of a torch that, when disturbed, will automatically turn on, illuminating the immediate area. Taking the miners’ concept and re-appropriating it for the everyday. The language of the objects has addressed basic need with sensibilities toward orientation, functionality, product language and tactile detail. The representation of the objects reflects details that users tend to take for granted … objects that function, even in failure.
Cathrine and Michiko have a shared interest in the relationships people forge with and through nature. We are also both provoked by questions about whose knowledge and expertise comes to ‘count’ socially. As a speculative designer, Michiko seeks to challenge and disorient her audience’s assumptions in order to open opportunities for future change. As an ethnographer, Cathrine seeks to recalibrate her own assumptions via the worldviews of the people she works with in order to better understand cultural processes and everyday experiences.
While we have both previously conducted research that feeds into this current project, we have focused here on ethnographic data collected by Cathrine when she worked with British gardeners. This research sought to contextualise British debates over genetically modified food by asking about grounded knowledge: how do people with everyday knowledge about plants and about growing food make sense of genetic modification?
Initial stages of this research led to a host of related questions: How do gardeners conceptualise and understand the plants they work with? How is this expertise built, developed, and shared? How can we explain the ways in which gardening practice insists on reciprocal parallels between human bodies and intentionality and those of plants? While gardeners do not equate humans with plants, plants are incorporated into a worldview that is not straightforwardly dividable into ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. Indeed, this research revealed a number of mutually implicating parallels between plants and people in both the English language and in gardening practice and knowledge. The research demonstrated the highly social and autobiographical aspects of gardening and plants, encompassing a writing of social relations, memory, experience, and personal history onto individual plants and gardens. Consequently, the relationships evoked between humans and plants in gardening practice, knowledge and technique surpass a simple ‘human-other’ divide of Western ontology.
Seeding Knowledge
Plant Life is comprised of two related design objects: Let’s Grow a Plant Together and Optostirps. Both projects were created to involve people in the natural world via gardening but in ways new to them. Both projects also draw on vernacular ideas about plants and gardening in British culture that emerged from the research described above, and employ them as foundational principles.
Let’s Grow a Plant Together is a collaborative plant growing and learning experience for beginner gardeners. Gardening is deeply social: gardeners learn through trial and error, but also through sharing success stories and problems with each other. Beginner gardeners however often have difficulty accessing this knowledge. To solve this problem, this project created three teams of beginner gardeners in London and Newcastle and invited them to grow a plant from seed together. Each team has a blog where members post pictures and comment daily on the plant. Team members were provided with each other’s contact details, a pot, soil, seeds, and no other information. The project has brought individual team members and the three teams into a network as they can observe each other’s progress, dilemmas, and solutions.
Optostirps is a project working with established gardeners. It offers the chance to open up discussions on the potential futures of gardening and plants by asking gardeners to imagine what sorts of wishes could be expressed via plants. Optostirps plays on the classification conventions of plants in the Western world whereby all known plants have two Latin names. The radish is, for example, Raphanus sativus. Raphanus is the plant’s genus name and sativus is its species name. Optostirps, or “I wish plant”, is the genus name for this collection of future plants. Each plant also has a corresponding species name that reflects the issues raised by the gardener consulted.
Wedded to Traditions? Arranged Marriages and South Asians in Britain.
The design stems from my PhD research which examined the motivations, performances and discourses of arranged marriage among the South Asian population of Britain. This research destabilises the image of arranged marriage as a practice in need of change and updating to a western form of kinship. The discourse of arranged marriage is employed by British Asians to not only further their ties of kinship but also to reflect and construct their identity narratives of being Asian and British. The subversion, translation and reworking of the ways in which arranged marriage is performed points not to a new, better, western or modern form of the practice but to a discourse that is uniquely British Asian.
My research concludes that the enunciation of discourses of arranged marriage occupy a space that is neither inside nor outside the minority and majority cultures but is at a tangential and ambivalent relation to them. An acknowledgment of the fluid, hybrid and dynamic nature of identities sets up the possibility of imagining a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy. Finally, I propose that instead of using the yardstick of hegemonic norms to reify and judge minority cultural practices one needs to regard them as part of Britain, as another thread, among many, that is woven in the tapestry of British culture. The associations of identity with nationality, ethnicity, religion or culture are all imagined and as such can be reimagined in the context of a globalising world.
Crossing Boundaries: Barriers Danced
In order to visualise the interstitial passage between fixed identifications and their dynamic negotiation we have employed the metaphor of dance. The dance supports the active nature of migrant identities. The footprints create a dance pattern which invites the audience to experience and reflect on the tensions and negotiations (risk, effort, struggle, courage and guilt) that are involved in the evolution of migrant identities. The individual patterns on the footprints borrow British and Indian symbols. They are interwoven to form a new design which highlights the processes of hybridity – a Fish ‘n’ Chips rangoli and a Lion spiral. These are colour coded with reference to the national flag colours of the UK and India. The patterns are presented in a zoom in and zoom out configuration in order to stress the importance of distance, both cultural and geographical, in our perception of the meaning and value attached to cultural artefacts.
The dance steps follow the style of a traditional North East Indian dance called Cheraw from the state of Mizoram. It employs bamboo poles to create patterns which dancers jump and hop over. The dancers follow the rhythm produced by the tapping of bamboo poles. We have replaced the bamboo with barrier and hazard tape in order to invite the audience to reflect on the psychological barriers that hinder cultural interaction. Their incorporation in a dance which invites participation is in aid of highlighting the fact that all forms of cultural negotiation involve crossing and jumping barrier but they do not necessarily presuppose the eradication of a cultural practice or artefact altogether. The possibility of improvisation that mediums such as dance and music offer also emphasizes the invented nature of traditions.
Prof. Alastair Bonnett. Professor of Social Geography, Dr Catherine Alexander and Dane Whitehurst
Memories of Place
The research project focuses on urban memory, nostalgia and use of the city amongst ex-residents of Tyneside. The research is premised on the idea that, in an era marked by the large-scale movement of people away from the city, it is necessary to connect memory, place and migration. How do memories of the place we once called ‘home’ shape the way we use that place today? Do we feel connected to the places we have left and how do those connections matter? The project investigates how memory and nostalgia shape both the representation of the city and the way it is accessed and used by ex-residents.
Recent years have witnessed a re-orientation in debates about migration and memory. A new openness to the complexities and chronic nature of emotions of loss, especially as applied to loss of place, has emerged to challenge the orthodoxy that nostalgia is necessarily uncreative, conservative and/or ephemeral. At the same time, issues of migration and ethnicity have begun to be discussed in ways that allow the plurality and intimate histories of the topic to be explored. These two research trajectories are relatively new and the proposed research is designed to facilitate this interaction.
In-depth interviews and mind mapping techniques will be used to gather empirically deep and historically rich data. Mental mapping has traditionally been used to develop a better understanding of the differences between official cartographic space and how people actually perceive and use the city. The proposed research takes this approach further by asking respondents to mentally map the city of the present and of the past. Alastair and Catherine are particularly interested to uncover whether ex-residents see themselves as having a continued stake in the city, and whether they approach it with mixed emotions. The research will generate material that will be publicly archived at the Regional Resource Centre at Beamish Museum.
Seeing the Past in the Present
Alastair, Catherine and Dane’s design brief for the found object was very much based upon the premise of active nostalgia – that nostalgia is something that actively impacts on how we perceive and interpret the city. In this way, we wanted to materialise the idea that nostalgia is something that is very much ‘carried’ with people in their everyday lives.
As such, we wanted to design something based upon explaining, encouraging and enabling participants in the research project – and other ex-residents of Tyneside – to explore the geography of their own nostalgia. Our design brief, then, was to produce a ‘tool kit’ which will allow people to explore the city in a new way: one that takes full account of their history and past memories of living in the city.
The explorers’ kit comprises of several objects commonly associated with the activity of exploring. These objects have each been mutated in some way so as to narrate their additional functionality as means to discuss people’s perceptions of nostalgia, memory and place. The binoculars have been reworked to incorporate a slide-viewer into the left eye-piece. This allows people to insert historical images of specific sites within the city and overlay them against the view of the modern day. We like the idea that people will revisit these sites and project their own histories, memories and stories and make comparisons between the past and present. The compass is designed not to point north as would usually be expected: but as an emotional aid to enable people to explore the geography of their own nostalgia, by indicating the direction of the places they feel the most emotionally attached to. Thus it is weighted towards the specific ‘hotspots’ of the city as revealed by the empirical research.
We are also exploring the potential of compiling the ‘mind maps’ of individuals into an ‘emotional intensity’ map of the region. This, again, is emotionally ‘weighted’ to represent ‘hotspots’ of the area. In this way sites of particular nostalgia will be disproportionally enlarged, rather than geographically representative.
Yvette’s research in journals such as ‘Education Review’, ‘British Journal of the Sociology of Education’, ‘Gender and Education’ has empirically explored the themes of educational inclusion, investigating initial access routes into university and the ways inequalities often endure beyond the university door. Extracts from interviews across her C-SAP and British Academy funded projects are exhibited rather differently here, enabling these to extend beyond the academic page. This research enables a critical perspective on issues of ‘diversity’ and ‘internationalisation’ resonating with Yvette’s administrative responsibilities (Admissions Officer), where university criteria and policies are negotiated and regulated.
Accessions began with Yvette, Ben and Stuart thinking through how we arrived at university. In those journeys we mapped our dis-locations: geographical, emotional and material barriers had to be stepped over but, having ‘arrived’, were theses were now smoothed over and solved? Our (non)academic selves and subject matters were complicated in re-telling the inside, in and through a sense of the outside: the rhetorical appeal of ‘widening participation’ and the reality of elitism; the drive of public engagement and the economies of impact; the complexities and complicities between power, privilege and (dis)engagement.
Taking a tour around campus rendered many places suddenly strange: the pictorial cordon around a development site already branded the university, depicting its future and its audiences. We felt rather unfamiliar and unknowing in the centralised student services building: its glassy transparent façade was countered by not knowing where to go (no signage) and if we were allowed to be there? Hesitancies continued in walking through campus, realising too the lack of children and older people. Perhaps they had not seen themselves depicted on the cordon? Perhaps they had not yet been targeted or selected… What would it mean to tell stories of various arrivals, successes and failures? What would it mean to open up space beyond the numerical appraisal of ‘diversity’?
Educational (E)quality
Initial ideas revolved around redesigning the UCAS (University Central Admissions Service) form, which enables students to represent themselves – their grades, achievements, and ambitions – to the university. We asked if this form, which contains a series of demarcated boxes to tick, write-in and fill-up, overlaid with bureaucratic codes (circles for school area, squares for mature status and so on) could be stretched or even distorted, in order to allow different stories. But we were cautious about trying to create a casual satire or a new-and-improved form that would have its own problems. So we asked broader questions about doing university differently: What if access was automatic, rather than monitored? What would the city look like if it was run by academics? What would ‘community engagement’ be like if the local citizenry was versed in Foucault, Bourdieu, Butler?
This pushed us towards other ideas, even as the pressure to respond to them with a final, exhibited product intensified. We considered what ‘waste’ is generated in the space of one academic day; what would be given up forever in shredding outcomes and paper trails? We came to see ‘university space’ as what Stuart calls a ‘sensing and sensual environment’, a kind of fog, sea or twilight where data, postures and attitudes continually condense and evaporate – a zone with definite, but not always easily articulated, boundaries and limits. We felt that in what we made, issues of participation, diversity, impermanence, apprehension, and transgression should be integral. The central figure of the work became that reusable staple of educational environments, the blackboard, as a space to combine Yvette’s research with the architectural and procedural interests of Ben and Stuart. This is now offered to an audience that can erase our own images and words: participation as an always ongoing, provisional, contested exercise rather than a completed output.
Catherine and Alastair are both working on a research project on urban nostalgia, which is indicating that there are specific ‘hotspots’ in the city that are common to many people’s memories and nostalgia for Tyneside. The interventions collaboration very much wanted to use these ‘hotspots’ as a key focus for work produced.
Dane’s design expertise centres upon found objects, and he had gained a thorough understanding of the intention of the academic research before we met. Dane had already come up with some clear design ideas which offered specific ways that the research could be materialised into objects. Given the preliminary stage of the research project, this also worked to extended and imaginatively remap the academics’ perception of the research into alternative forms of popular creative participation.
In a sense, this combination of focus, flexibility and expertise quickly overcame any initial anxieties or preconceptions that we had of each other before our initial meeting; and made it much easier for us to get focussed on a specific design brief almost immediately.
During our first three-day collaborative meeting, we were also at the advantage of being able to take Dane on a walking tour of the area that the research was focussed upon, and to engage in intensive debates about the culture of the research. Catherine described and explained a number of ‘mind maps’ drawn by participants from their memories of Tyneside from the present and past. Dane also had the opportunity to accompany Catherine – and to take part – in interviewing 2 participants and observing their mind-mapping sessions.
This intensive introductory period allowed us ample opportunity for relaxed reflection and engagement with the importance of memory in the city, and of the landscapes that are hooked in people’s minds and that that draw them or repel them. These ideas formed the centre of our subsequent conversations – how to design a found object from the concept of memory that is so abstract, so immaterial and yet has such a continuous and powerful presence in the way we use and navigate the city. There was something fun and challenging about that translation, or synthesis, from the abstract to the concrete. We have talked about this in a personal way as well, what our memories are and how this shapes what we do. So the project isn’t just about us looking at others, but is shot through with our own stories.
Raksha: My initial attraction towards Interventions Project was a result of a hobbyist interest in design and modern art. With the project’s focus on initiating and encouraging a dialogue between social science and design practitioners, it seemed like an ideal opportunity to further this interest. I am also concerned with looking at the different ways of visualising and presenting my PhD research. This is not just to make it accessible to a larger variety of audiences but also to learn about the knowledge making exercise at large. My interactions with Grit, a communications designer, have helped me to turn a self-critical eye towards my claims as an interpreter and author in scholarship that is partial to the written word.
Grit: My interest in the Interventions project is rooted in the dialogue with social science. I am very excited about the process of the Interventions. Overall I feel that too much valuable knowledge and understanding is buried in academic drawers.
As a communication designer I am interested in engaging with people in various stages and levels, involving my skills to visualise complexity, making abstract thought tangible, emotionally engage, inform and uplift. I am looking to put greater emphasis on the process and exchange of thought, skills and knowledge.
Meeting and working with Raksha, a social scientist and human geographer, has been eye-opening in many ways. Her insights have been enriching and every meeting inspiring.
For me the value and beauty of combining expertise knowledge and skills – in our case those of social science and design – is to create knowledge and understanding and new experiences.
The dance-sketch (kaleidoscope)
The process
Raksha: We began our project by initiating a dialogue through emails where we exchanged examples of our work. This involved sections of my PhD thesis and Grit’s design portfolio with samples of her work and exhibits. The actual dialogue only began in the three day work shop at Newcastle University where we finally got to meet.
This was marked by some intense discussion ranging in themes from our common interests to our lives as migrants in Britain. It soon became clear that we did have some shared interests however what was more difficult to grapple with was what is it that we wanted to present as part of the project. Defining and sharpening the focus was the most challenging part.
I discovered that I am conditioned and regimented by my disciplinary background to a much larger extent than I had realised.
We drafted some four ideas as potential research projects. They are all united in themes dealing with the dynamism inherent in identity positions. Our focus was more inclined towards exploring this in the case of migrant identities which was also part of my PhD research.
Grit: The initial exchange of work, sections of Raksha’s Phd thesis and samples of my design work, via email formed an interesting starting point before we first met in person for a three day workshop. I was very intrigued. My initial worry about a conflict deriving from my clichéd western-eyed view on the problematic involved in arranged marriages turned into a fascinating dialogue on the active nature and dynamics of traditions and identities, focusing on South-Asians in Britain.
The overlaps of interests we’ve discovered along both of our previous work were very exciting and I enjoyed our conversations. I was fascinated by the beauty of the words Raksha was using to build her arguments. Amongst very complicated terminology Raksha uses beautiful visual words with great poesy, ‘lens’ being one of them.
Even though our approaches are quite different the parallels we found asking the question: How do we create knowledge together? are fascinating. We looked at our methodologies – Raksha, as social scientist and myself as communication designer, bringing up the following basic steps of our general process:
1. All starts with something capturing our interest or imagination, followed by a question: what is the impact?
2. How do we translate this interest into a research – design project? What are the questions rising up around this interest subject? We are looking to find out more and to define the aim and objectives for this project.
3. How do we find answers?
We define: the framework – the medium and style. In Raksha’s words we are defining the lens to focus or magnify. The lens is picked by the assumptions we have, by our knowledge and how we gained our knowledge & our believe systems. We are borrowing existing theories – designs to understand and than explain. From there we can go further to explore and tap into new territory and to create new theories – designs.
4. We collect data:
In the form of interviews, observations, diaries, drawing, by being in their everyday life (= ethnographic research), by visiting according places, observing habits, patterns, colours, movements, materials, (visual references) – the methods are united by the idea that we learn more about the subject.
5. What translates the raw data: into a thesis – into a design?
What is the organizing device that helps us to create a story that speaks back? We are coding the raw data – putting TAGS, Memos, highlighting words; grouping elements to their features, filtering layers of materiality, structure, pattern, symbolics, colour, defining the visual key that opens the doors, leading us to the hook that pulls all details and holds the red thread
6. What is the output? Here we realize the biggest difference:
For Raksha, a social scientist, the output will ‘always’ be something to read. Her visualization will be in the form of words with the expectation for people to make an effort to read. Her construction of knowledge is geared towards something written.
For me, as a designer, the output can manifest itself in a number of forms and medias, Always choosing the media that best supports the purpose, brings the best experience and be most engaging. It will always be something visual and to experience.
The aim and objective might change in the process.
Great excitement turned into great struggle defining our focus in what we wanted to present as part of this project. This was by far the most challenging part. We were looking to create something that stands and lives in the exhibition context, and also forms a potential base for further explorations. It’s been exciting to explore and find ‘common ground’ together.
We drafted four ideas as potential research projects. All evolving around the active nature and the dynamics of hyphenated identities and evolving tradition with the focus on South Asians in Britain, informing and shaping our exhibition piece.
Patterns and directions (Bricklane, London)
Idea 1
Inviting the concept of arranged marriage into the western culture, highlighting that arrangements and practicalities are part of any partnership and so part of love marriages as well as love and romance can be found in arranged marriages – at the same time visualising the complexity, the multi-layered and also problematic nature of this practice.
Idea 2
What are our tools? (to live and to make sense) — the tool of our origin & the tools of the culture we chose to live in? This looked at visualising the significance of context in making meaning when it comes to cultural symbols and ‘tools’. It also ties in with our interest in material cultures and their significance in inventing traditions.
Sketch: Shiva, a major Hindu deity, and the transformer of the Trimurti, the Hindu Trinity of the primary aspects of the divine, holding western style cutlery, knife and fork (instead of trident and drum)
Idea 3
This was focused on how boundaries and barriers within the discourse on multiculturalism in Britain can be re-visualised through the framework of invented traditions and fluid identities. We assembled our conception of barriers into:
a) barriers that we cannot cross
b) barriers that we can cross
c) barriers that we can change.
The idea here was to highlight the point that identity positions are subjective and reflexive. A willingness and open mindedness on our part will define what ‘type’ (a,b or c) a barrier is and to what degree it can be crossed or negotiated.
Tape sketch collage pattern using British and Indian national flag colours
Stencil photograph by akav, Copenhagen
Red-white barrier tape.
Idea 4
Which role does language play?
Looking at the role of language, as coding system, to transmit information and define the way we think of ourselves and the world, the future, the past, the present. Ideas, structures, barriers are inherent in language. We think of developing symbols that brought together features from the Roman and Devanagari script, conveying the idea of cultural hybridity and Homi Bhabha’s conception of ‘the third space’.
Bi-lingual signage
Image 11: shop font signage
The Indian Type Foundry (ITF) attempts to give as much attention to Non-Latin as to Latin fonts. Their first typeface project is Devanagari. Fedra Hindi, a Devanagari companion to Fedra Sans – by Peter Bilak & SN Rajpurohit of The Indian Type Foundry.
http://www.indiantypefoundry.com/fonts
Sketch: ambersand, hyphen, Devanāgarī’s distingtive horizontal bar as icon of cultural hybridity.
Exhibition Piece
Finally, all these ideas were feeding into our exhibition piece called Crossing boundaries: Barriers danced. It employs the metaphor of dance in order to highlight the interstitial passage between fixed identity positions.
The exhibition piece focuses on active engagement of the audience in the theme, and the dynamics of migrant hybrid identity. The subject can be experienced with the efforts, tensions, joys and struggles involved in the negotiation and evolution of migrant identities. The dance is an experience and tool rather than a passive observation.
Our dialogue and ping pong in developing the exhibition piece, even though we missed a few balls in between, was very inspiring and interesting. Our final chosen dance-style references the traditional bamboo dance “Cheraw”, from Mizoram, India.
(you tube)
Bamboo dancers, Philipines
Discussed cultural symbols from Britain und India forming the patterns in the footprint, examples: fish’n’chips.
Rangoli* photograph in Hampi India by Paul Prudence
*A rangoli is a traditional Indian chalk drawn geometric pattern. These complex symmetrical patterns are constructed by connecting a matrix of dots in a systematic way. They are usually drawn on the front veranda of Indian households.
After watching several clips of the traditional “Cheraw”, we were ready to sketch out and test the dance steps.
Cate: My interest in participating in Interventions is two fold. As a social anthropologist, I have sought in my work to explore ways in which everyday expertise can be celebrated and also to find ways in which to explain why and how social science matters. Ethnography, my research method, is arguably a way of seeing and perceiving the world. It is a way of recalibrating one’s own perspective and orientating instead via the worldviews of the people that the ethnographer is working with. I am an ethnographer, a social anthropologist, and most recently I have been working with British gardeners.
Plot with flowers and vegetables growing
Gardening is not simply a neutral set of practices or a past-time – it is a set of practices and form of knowledge that is also embedded in highly significant social, cultural and historical parameters. Celebrating the supposedly mundane, such as gardening, for the rich cultural set of practices that it is is one way of bringing my two objectives of celebrating everyday expertise and finding ways to explain why social science matters together. Interventions struck me as a unique opportunity to collaborate with colleagues who are also interested in horizontal thinking, interested in shifting perspectives, and in engaging with other disciplinary traditions.
Initially, I wasn’t sure what to expect but I do remember wondering before I met her how Michiko and I would be able to talk about our interests across disciplinary divides – what would our shared language be? Would we find one? Michiko then sent me the link to her web portfolio and I was intrigued by how similar our interests were and also by how beautiful her design and art is.
I aspire to achieve beauty in my writing, but it felt much more tangible in her design work. When we had our first meeting, we spent an initial block of time walking and describing our respective research interests and research methodologies. I brought some examples of material culture from my gardening research (one, a beautiful gift that had been made for me; others were historical photos; and some of my writing) and we looked at some of Michiko’s portfolio of previous design work (especially her Extreme Green Guerrillas). This exchange of stories and sharing of artefacts really set fire to both our imaginations.
Some of the ‘material culture’ of Cate’s fieldwork
We then began brainstorming different possible design collaboration scenarios by trying to identify a shared problem that we wanted to address, and settled on troubling expert knowledge and on beginner gardeners. Getting to design ideas was easier than I had imagined because ultimately it wasn’t an object per se that Michiko wanted to build but rather a process of opening up opportunities to question and challenge that were more important.
Throughout, I have been astonished and delighted by how similar our perspectives and understandings are. We may work in different ways, but we are both deeply motivated by similar fascinations with the social and cultural worlds in which we live. One of the biggest differences I’ve noticed is how we organise our thoughts. I must write and take notes; Michiko needs to draw along with writing short words:
Michiko on left, Cate on right
More of Cate’s organising scribbles
Michiko: My initial purpose in joining Interventions was to widen my range of experience in my design portfolio. I also wanted to move away from mundane ways of working and normal methods in design by collaborating instead with social scientists. By doing so, I wanted to challenge myself to develop meaningful design outcomes, rather than just a visualisation of data.
During the first brainstorm session on the first day of our work together on Interventions, I was impressed that we both are interested in creating poetic stories to engage with the public, even though the method or outcome might be different. Every time we have met, I have been inspired and excited by Cate’s stories and thinking methods. This in turn has helped me come up with proposals for research design outcomes. I was also astonished with the emotional experience Cate goes though with participants as an anthropologist, and found out how “real” her research outcomes are. As a designer, this resonates very much with me because I believe that designers should be designing for real publics, not for some idealised (but perhaps non-existent) persona.
As an outcome, I originally wanted to design some sort of concrete object. However I realised that neither of us wanted to just produce something for the sake of it and end up with a shallow concept. Instead, we both seek to extend our collaboration relationship beyond Interventions. This made me think instead about how we could develop an exhibition piece which inspires the audience to join our project, rather than just produce something as a passive installation. Gradually, I started to feel more comfortable ending up with research design outcome rather than concrete design solution.
Browne, J. 1996 “Botany in the boudoir and garden: the Banksian context”. In: D. Miller and P. Reill (eds) Visions of empire: Voyages, botany and representations of nature. Cambridge: CUP.
We talked a lot during that first day about gardening in Britain: the social relationships expressed through gardening, the relationships gardeners have with plants that express more than a simple metaphorical connection between humans and non-humans, the ways in which plants are described and explained in everyday gardening practice, and the historical context of flower and vegetable gardening in Britain. This interconnectedness between human and non-human realms gave us a lot of food for thought…an example of this is the 18th century illustration (above) that Cate brought in to share.
In all the ferment of excitement over exchanging ideas about our research (and discovering all their points in common), we were also working during that first day to a strict time schedule. We needed by the end of the day to begin articulating concrete directions to our work together, and to present these to the rest of the group. One way of finding a shared language was to pull key themes out of our discussion and to map them. Some of the results of this are shown below in the figure with all the post-it notes…Working in this way (reviewing ideas by talking together whilst simultaneously drawing them down in icons and then sticking them to a larger sheet) was Michiko’s suggestion and forte, and not something Cate had done before (nor something she was sure she could do!). However, from Cate’s perspective, drawing rather than writing ended up being extremely liberating. It made a potentially difficult situation of figuring out what we were going to do much more enjoyable, and helped us both find a way to represent our delight at the great potential our collaboration promised. The project ideas were only just germinating at this point, and over the next few weeks we kept exchanging revised and polished versions of how to bring them to life, such as in the final image below.
Photos by Nick Ballon
Photo by 
Please join us for the Interventions exhibition ExLibris Gallery at Newcastle University, from 29th June – 7th July.
