the second was a personal project to design a feature of the park from the park plan. I chose to develop a redesign of the lighting.
The main focus, for me, in these projects was to try and cram as much community engagement and user research into these projects as I had time for. Firstly, because some of my influencers like Don Norman and Victor Papanek had seriously advised for this type of design, but also because our tutor was trying to encourage me to leave egocentric design behind, and develop a strong portfolio of user engagement.
This project really did get me out of my shell, it gave me the confidence to talk to strangers and ask their opinions; it got me out in the field considering the physical nature of the problem we were attempting to solve; and it got me a more go-getting approach to getting out of creative blocks - by considering them more as societal and community issues and not insular creative ones.
The project then was a total reversal of fortunes when compared with the 'terry' project prior to it. The users came first, almost to the extent that they designed it themselves. It was multi-phased careful, considerate and sensitive; and it was well received by all parties - school community and council. Successful all round!
But I still have nagging feelings - was it aesthetic?
This was a project about combatting my internal demons, about reaching out. But the nagging feeling I had was that I wasn't designing anything at all, I was assembling the layman's hurriedly formed opinions into a vague, catch-all plan. Why can't I just get out my pen and create? Didn't Henry Ford say -
"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses"
?
At times I craved a project where we weren't required to prove everything, to ask people what they wanted, to test our proposals with real people. I would have loved to ignore the budget, ignore the current park, and just follow through with my own personal 'innovation'. Isn't Design the only andwer I need?
This rigid, but visually unified design, just mocked up on photoshop now, is the kind I wanted to design. It's simple, cohesive, functional, it has unity, it has vision. It's more of a 'design' than a few 'careful, well thought out' (pfft) minor additions. It's bold. And it's easier to summarise - into an icon or a soundbite or a single rendering.
But hand both to any member of the community and you're pretty much guaranteed that the former would win (the one we presented). The public don't care about 'design' and they don't talk our language. What may make sense to us, as people reliant on the very theories we purport, is at most meaningless, or at it's worst, wrong. I'm talking about our reliance on 'rules' on the history of design, on 'design as a skill' and as an artistic pursuit. We can never keep the real world as clean as our renderings, we can't get people to sit where we want, and we can't control the development as perfectly as our vision demands.
In summary, design (especially something as community focused as landscape architecture) is challenged by it's lack of conclusive power. We yearn for a world where we can control everything. But today's world doesn't want our grand utopian plans like it did in the 50's, it wants us to be assistants, it wants us to work with communities and users in order to find answers together. It's a heartbreaking loss of power, but maybe the most positive one.
