IN-PERSON Barcelona. Section A

Abstract

This paper will summarise a body of design research that draws together two methodologies: a study of everyday ritual practices and objects and an urban mapping of financialised spatiality. Across three projects it examines and visually interprets the results of a participatory design method based on community-building role-playing games, that sequences a network of desirability. Through mapping that eschews traditional scaled and spatial drawing in favour of symbolic representation, the exercise invites participants to engage in collective drawings of territory from which emerges a set of relationships and adjacencies that indicate priorities and desirability, conflicts and congestions. 1. A pedagogical test run through an Architectural Design Studio at RMIT University. Students use the method to build a ficto-critical psychogeography, resulting in an imagined narration of territory that is not sited or scaled, but builds through event and object. 2. An urban scale test using the rapidly developing periphery of Melbourne. Looking to compare how the territory shifts when priorities shift. It operates as a bridging mechanism between the very real and abstract desires of participants, and the spatial expertise of architects, testing the emerging priorities of participants in a realised landscape and relaying subsequent relations and adjacencies onto the topography. 3. A scalar sequence, inviting desire and priority into the Block, the Street, the House. This narrowing of focus allocates and distributes these relations and adjacencies into the urban and intramural, creating a connective tissue of design that tethers participant to place in a blurred and mutually defining entanglement.