独家优惠奖金 100% 高达 1 BTC + 180 免费旋转

Introducing Street Detectorism

We have been having conversations with people interested in how people react and interact with their physical environment, and have pooled together different methods, tools and experiences to inform our thinking and experiments around what street detectorism could become. We are using this lab note as a design tool to gather all this thinking to enable doing, and to invite curious people along the journey with us.

Detectorism is a made up word that encourages people to do the learning side of doing without being scared or switching off from research. It is to encourage the inner curiosity of everybody through doing fun and creative activities.

Detectorism is a form of continuous learning. It is a way of being curious in the world, paying attention to patterns at a range of scales, and experimenting with ways to reveal our collective insights (or what we call treasures) to inform our designs and actions. We capture detectorism treasure and feed it back into the learning and design process.

Detectorism in the wild is about embracing different ways of learning and knowing from people with different methods, disciplines, world-views and lived experiences. It is co-created with everyone but has some core components:

We recognise a need to design shared learning approaches and experiences better suited to encouraging a town-wide culture of curiosity and experimentation. The learning, imagining and the action are interdependent. This multi-method, multi-discipline, and multiple-worldview approach seeks to make the lab insights more reflective of our complexity and diversity as natural beings. In being more reflective, we hope our insights will be more relatable, meaningful, and therefore more actionable.

Street detectorism is a branch of detectorism in the wild that we are developing to use all our senses to discover how people move, act, interact, socialise, and respond to Dudley High Street. Through collective observations and experiences, we hope to grow our awareness and understanding of our surroundings, and use this to inspire us and help us co-design High Street experiments in an informed and contextual way. We can then use our senses to fully take in any changes that our experiments cause, learn from them for future experiments, and share what we’ve discovered to make it easier for other people to do their own experiments.

Street detectorism is another way detectorism in the wild tries to socialise research for collective sense making and action. It is experiential; rooted in the space, place and people; it requires observation, listening and slowing down; and ultimately reimagining the purpose of the High Street.

In 2020, we started experimenting with Public Life Studies, an approach developed by architect Jan Gehl, in response to a High Street that doesn’t encourage assembly, interaction, connection, feelings of security or creative collaboration. We wanted to do this to:

Gehl sees public spaces as meeting places, he seeks to create spaces of assembly not dispersal; he explicitly links dimensions of space with sense of place and views these as in a reinforcing relationship.

Gehl encourages us to explore the relationship between the built environment and patterns of space use. He does this through the systematic documentation of the performance of urban space (e.g. levels of pedestrian flow, levels & length of stationary activity, observations of human contact and social interaction) and then analysing the factors that shape that performance (e.g. interaction with the weather, street furniture, building height, lighting, materials used, presence of interactive components, flow of transport, connection with transport hubs etc).

For Gehl, the urban landscape must be considered through the 5 human senses and experienced at the speed of walking. He focuses upon sustainability of materials and resources, the quality of shared spaces, security and pedestrian comfort. He looks to design for places of staying, stopping, lingering. He looks to design for multi-functional spaces, visibility, accessibility, density, active frontages, moving and stationary components and activities. His designs prioritise pedestrians.

Our summer findings were collated into documents and shared in our networks and widely online. We found these were mostly accessed by people in power and didn’t seem to contribute to changing cultures. Our subsequent conversations with our business neighbours around creating a safe and friendly High Street, using our research and findings, started to move more towards shifting perceptions of the street, but still at the surface of one part of the ecosystem. Street detectorism would seek to involve and share data with everyone in the street ecosystem to nurture agency, culture change, and the capacity to reimagine the High Street.

Jenny has explored how to make the process of carrying out public life street assessments easier: researchers receive training, and in Edinburgh Living Lab’s latest assessment, researchers used iPads to draw findings on layers over maps. Jenny also explored how to make the tools and data more visually accessible: one adaptation includes creating a colour wheel to share data gathered through Gehl’s 12 quality criteria:

One way of creating conditions for curiosity and experimentation is to share our process out loud. This lab note is a culmination of tools and ideas sparked from conversations with other members of the CoLab Dudley team, Time Rebels and Fellow Travellers in our ecosystem. This will catapult us into the prototyping stage.

Gehl talks about the importance of regular ‘registrations’ to gather data over time and to see the effects of any changes in a place. Edinburgh Living Lab are carrying out their street assessment before and after their High Street Tweaks. We will be prototyping tools with Time Rebels prior to DoFest for our first data gathering, and to co-evolve street detectorism as a creative experience that people from the High Street can dip into during DoFest.

All data is treasure and everyone has a detectorism super power. We are developing street detectorist activities that will welcome different types of street detectorists, and tap into all sorts of gifts in our ecosystem:

The design of the activities have been inspired by Gehl and Edinburgh Living Lab, as well as:

Kevin Lynch — an urban planner who explored how people could use cognitive mapping to record how they understand their surroundings.

Larissa Fassler — an artist who creates maps with drawings, collage and notes of observations and conservations to explore how ‘places affect people, psychologically and physically, and in turn how people’s perception, understanding and use of place is physically manifest in the built environment that surrounds them.’

In addition to our activities and tools inspired by public life studies and cognitive and emotional mapping, we want to integrate nature within them, so street detectorists don’t see the urban realm and the people within it as separate from nature, but all as a whole.

We have also drawn inspiration from permaculture design (the design of self-sufficient ecosystems) methods of observation.

Street detectorist tools and activities will try to:

Recognition of patterns, relationships and historic and future contexts ties in with our principles to ‘be good ancestors’ and ‘join the dots’.

In line with public life studies, we want street detectorism to capture the High Street purpose, aesthetic, functionality and use, but move away from ahistorical work by layering this with deep time e.g. geology, the industrial revolution, the British empire.

We can try to bring these layers and range of data together in relationship with the rest of the ecosystem to help us reveal patterns and insights that inform our journey to a kinder, more creative and connected High Street.

These insights will help to inform future experiments rooted in historical and future contexts, and help us to avoid short term or ahistorical quick solutions.

We want to avoid street detectorism becoming transactional or passive, for both the process and what we do with data/treasure.

For the process, the street detectorists’ experiences of collecting and sharing data is as important (if not more) than the contents of the data. Street detectorists will already have a relationship with Dudley High Street — they will be of the place, rather than detached researchers or drop-in professionals. We will avoid asking street detectorists to collect personal data or to make assumptions on people’s ethnicity, gender or age. Some of the street detectorism tools and activities we are developing will invite people of the High Street to connect with strangers. The street detectorists can gift their findings to a co-created map in our Observatory to see how they are embedded within a collective effort to understand the High Street.

Detectorism in the wild is about different ways of seeing, knowing, and sharing. Street detectorists will be invited to humanise their data in ways that celebrate their gifts and talents e.g. through sketching, collage, spoken word and movement.

We want to create opportunities for people to build generous and trusting relationships, so we will invite new street detectorism enthusiasts to connect through using our tools and activities whenever they like, sharing their findings in the lab or online, and coming together to humanise each other’s data.

Add a comment

What is your view?

Send

Related posts:

Exclamation Marx

Exclamation Marx. Exclamation marks are virtual objects that are often used in modern text-based communication to simulate an attitude of, for lack of a….

A Brilliant Idea

As someone publicly and steadfastly opposed to the ludicrous economic development case that cannot be made for building a casino in downtown Hartford, when it was a hot topic a couple years ago, the…