Design for Difference - Student Work

Thomas Maisey - The DominatorSi Chen - Buses on the roadYu Han Wan - Shared ParkingSzu Wen Wang - Marquee

Lucie Barouillet - KBC AgendaAnton Bob Kraus - Conflict Basics Card DeckMasami Charlotte Lavault - Pro/ContraPierre Papet - Solve a conflict

Victor Johansson - Shared space crossingPaolo Nazzari - Toilets Gallery

Martyna Bielecka - PigeonsRémi Perrichon - Happy FlatIan Thomas - The Sound Proof BoothYi Zhou - Neighbourhood bins

Rahul Boggaram - Antonym VirusJing Luo - Self-bullied

Liliana Simões Carvalho - The Card. What Card?Alexandra Sidorenko - SmuggleChun-Ling Wu - The MaskCai-Jun Yang - SmartCard Black Market

The Road

Social Space for Learning Disabilities and Community Engagement

The Commons

The Neighbourhood

The School

The Workplace

DAC/MAID Design for DifferenceLIST OF WORKS

Thomas Maisey

The Dominator

This project focuses on the three conflicting areas existing on the road today between cyclists and cars, these being feeling, seeing and hearing each other. I began by getting some footage with a camera fixed to a helmet. The presence of the camera made the experience on the road much more pleasurable as other road users became more aware and conscious of their actions while being filmed. The camera made them ‘behave’, as a figure of authority like a police man on a bike would do. This psychological effect lead me to examine what other tactics could be used on the road for cyclists to feel safer, be heard and become more visible. The psychological markers already set out on the road systems do work, but with the increasing popularity of cycling, grey areas expand. My design probe, ‘The Dominator’, stimulates psychological awareness about cycle safety while setting physical boundaries. The design probes I have used are an exploration of the gap between the physical and psychological world.

The defence frame around the bike allows the cyclist to claim her/his own space while riding on the road. It keeps cars out of the bike zone at traffic lights and makes the cyclist feel safer - maintaining the safety distance between cyclist and car. The flag allows lorry drivers of class 1 & 2 to see the cyclist, whilst the horns allow the latter to be heard by cars, lorries and buses. The Dominator has been tested out and successfully improved cycling safety and pleasure on the road.

Critical

The Road

Video

Si Chen

Buses on the road

Empathetic

The Road

I focused on multiple routes bus stops - as they are often staging conflicts between drivers and passengers. Typically, many people wait at these bus stops, while many buses stop by simultaneously. A great confusion arises - passengers can fail to see that their bus has arrived, and/or cannot/do not move quickly enough towards the bus, sometimes placed at the end of a queue of several buses. Especially the physically impaired (mobility and/or vision) passengers, people with children and people carrying heavy loads find themselves in a stressful situation. On the other hand, drivers cannot always discern their passengers among the crowd of waiting travellers. They are tied to a strict time schedule and often have to confront angry or rude passengers. After a short wait, buses drive off quickly, leaving behind frustrated and angry travellers. A redesign of the space of the bus stop could have a positive influence on this ‘wicked’ situation - on one hand, by increasing the perceivability of both parties of the conflict and helping drivers and travellers to place themselves at the right spot on the other.A multicolor LED strip is placed along the pavement, marking the whole length of the multiple route bus stop area. Each route is associated with a colour. When a traveller reaches the bus stop, she/he has to press a button, to signal her/his wished route. Bus drivers are subsequently informed of the number of passengers waiting for them at each stop. When a bus approaches the stop, a section of the LED strip illuminates in the route’s colour, highlighting the zone where passengers should gather to get on the bus.

Yu Han Wan

Shared parking

A recurrent street conflict in Taïwan rises when residents occupy parking places in front of their houses - by setting up plants or furniture - preventing drivers from parking right before their front door. Although these residents do not own these slots, their behaviour implies that they consider them as extensions of their property. For drivers, this appropriation means wasting long minutes or hours looking for a parking space.Could residents and drivers share these spaces?

Shared parking is a communication platform where users arrange time slots for occupying parking lots, according to their needs. One parking lot can be used by many different users. On shared parking, residents and public users can directly negotiate instead of getting angry at unknown ‘offenders’.

Shared parking consists of a smart phone app linked to parking meters.Drivers can search and book a parking slot before arriving, using the shared parking smartphone app.When they park, they can leave a message to the attention of the residents as well as their phone number on the receipt printed by the parking meter.Thanks to the direct communication means shared parking provides, conflict can be minimised though not eradicated - conflicts henceforth happen in a transparent, honest way: unknown drivers can be ‘tracked down’ and residents, actually not legally allowed to use these street spaces as their own, still have a possibility to do so - as long as they share.

Agonism

The Road

Szu Wen Wang

Marquee

Bus drivers and passengers share the confined space of the bus during the time of their common travel. But many things can make the sharing difficult - ticketing issues, time pressure, rude behaviour and so on. In their cabin, bus drivers are separated from passengers. Their main instruction is to focus on driving, while travellers are reminded not to speak to the driver. In this often highly emotionally loaded space, non-communication is the rule.But how do drivers feel throughout their shifts? What would they complain about if they were allowed to do so? What are the stories they would want to share with their passengers? Did something interesting happen on the bus yesterday?Interviewing several bus drivers helped uncover their wish to have their say. A great frustration is gathered during daily conflicts, while a great friendliness gets lost behind the glass panel of the cabin.The functions of the artefacts that accompany our daily bus rides could be changed to increase driver-passenger intimacy. Particularly, two readily available communication devices (the LED display which announces the final destination/the next stop as well as the CCTV monitors) could be subverted. The bus driver can display stories and thoughts on the LED display, whilst broadcasting his favourite TV show on the CCTV channels.The subversion of bus displays eases the communication between passengers and driver while transforming the space of the bus into a platform to accommodate multiple voices. It empowers the minority: bus drivers get a chance to voice their needs, concerns and joys.

Agonistic

The Road

Video

Victor Johansson

Shared space crossing

The pedestrian crossing outside of Lewisham DLR and Southeastern train station is a very busy area. Around 70% of Lewisham’s 300.000 residents work out of the borough - twice a day, both pedestrians and car drivers gather densely in and around the station.Observing, filming and photographing the street crossing during rush hours (morning and evening) and at midday enables one to document the different nuances of the human flow in this area.Interviews of local residents - some of them having been living in the neighbourhood for more than 30 years - helped to understand drivers’ and pedestrians’ perspectives.

Every morning and evening, conflicts rise between car drivers and pedestrians - due to the latter crossing when they shouldn’t, hurrying to catch their train, and drivers congesting the zebra stripes or driving off too fast, endangering passersby. How do both parties negotiate their part of this common space? What happens if we take into consideration that the same person can be pedestrian at times and driver at others?

Drawing on shared space principles, the crossing could become an area of constant negotiation. In this new configuration, two objects are implemented to improve communication: boards to inform pedestrians and car drivers about the next train departure - according to train emergency, either cars or pedestrians have priority on the crossing. Stop buttons in two versions (one for cars, one for pedestrians) turn on a red light, forcing the other to get out of the way. The buttons empower the users, who do not only negotiate the space but get the means to question the conventions of traffic systems.

Agonistic

The Commons

Paolo Nazzari

Toilets Gallery

Public toilets in London are an unexpected stage of conflict, in which regular toilet users, hoping to find clean and functioning WC, are disturbed by the graphic treatment applied on walls by graffiti artists, looking to satisfy their need for expression. Would the conflict still arise if public toilets were converted into legal canvases for street artists? Could the experience of use be enhanced through aesthetic stimulation?Toilets Gallery is a network of (to-be-) painted toilets throughout the city. Painters register and get the right to paint one of the cabins. The registered community of users receives regular updates on new works of street (toilet) art, open to comments, liking and disliking.

Agonistic

The Commons

Lucie Barouillet, Anton Bob Kraus, Masami Charlotte Lavault, Pierre Papet

The trouble with the closure of the Ken Boyce Centre

At the launch of the project, a conflict had been growing for several months around the Ken Boyce Day Care Centre in Erith, southeast London, opposing its users - around 40 young adults with learning disability - to its provider, Bexley Council. Our task was to visualise this situation and address it through design. Starting by visiting the centre, we met the users and interviewed their carers and parents. These meetings provided us a great insight in the situation, whilst challenging our attempts to remain impartial. We repeatedly tried to get in touch with the Council - to no avail. Consequently, we had to cope with the lack of balance of the information available.As a main response to the conflict, we created a blog, kbcaction.blogspot.com, to document our research, design work, and response to the conflict. It is also, and mainly, a communication platform for all the people and institutions involved or interested in the Ken Boyce Centre conflict. An open space to react and share.

Agonistic


Videos

Lucie Barouillet

Ken Boyce Centre Agenda

This is an agenda delivered by Bexley Council to the people involved in the conflict. It is a method designed to build a project in a limited time, which meets both the requirements of the Council, and the needs of the community. This concept is based on the insight that in the KBC conflict, the Council does not really seem to consider alternatives. During one of the meetings with the parents, a Council’s representative announced that if they wanted a centre, users would have to look for a new location themselves. Co-design seems to be an appropriate answer in this case. Taking the Council’s words literally, why not hand over the project direction to the people who are the most affected, who otherwise feel completely ignored? This KBC Agenda involves users, parents, carers and key-workers by helping them fleshing out their ideas. From our interviews, we realised that these people have a lot of suggestions. They only miss a frame, a structure to organise and develop their project: finding a new location for the Ken Boyce Centre. The agenda is divided in three parts. In each of these parts, both collective and individual activities are suggested. Each member has an individual agenda which guides him/her throughout the project development. The group activities are supported by a kit including rules, a hourglass, a map of the area, a calculator, symbolic space dividers... The first phase is devoted to the analysis of the needs - list everybody’s requirements. The second phase is a research of alternatives - collect ideas, explore the spaces available locally and get in touch with the community. The third phase is the development or formulation of the project in terms of location, cost, services and organisation.The rules are designed for different purposes: neutrality, or impartiality between all the members, efficiency (as there is a date of expiration) and consideration of the Council’s constraints.In the box, a kit of cards and tools facilitates group work at each stage of the project.

Agonistic


Anton Bob Kraus

Conflict Basics Card Deck

This response is based on the insight that the users’ parents were at a very early stage of organisation when we interviewed them. I realized that among other things, setting up a contact list, scheduling discussion forums and electing a spokes(wo)man were highly important tasks to ensure efficiency, but were not as easy to implement as it seems. The parents, a loose group of individuals sharing the same interests when we met them, needed to plan their action.The „Conflict Basics“ playing cards aim to support the togetherness of a conflict group.By combining the group forming and communication supporting characteristics of a traditional parlour game, „Conflict Basics“ provides suggestions to what to do if you find yourself in a conflict and have to face an opponent.While playing, the users get to know the hints displayed on the cards. These tips are easy to recall in a later conflict situation.Depending on the colours, the cards provide suggestions on four focus points: public, relation, action and organisation. The suggestions are also rated regarding to the number.

Agonistic


Masami Charlotte Lavault

Pro/Contra Campaign

A pair of posters presents two diametrically opposed points of view on the Ken Boyce Centre closure conflict. Displayed all over the town of Erith - in cafés, shops and community buildings - the posters expose the validity of radical opinions and address the necessity to question one’s arguments as much as those of the “other”. The drawings are portraits of actual Erith residents and KBC users.The campaign is initiated by the Council and the association of KBC parents/users. The reactions of the audience are awaited on the blog kbcaction. An agonistic space is collectively created through the analogue stimulus on the street and the resulting digital output on the Internet.This campaign is a call for civic initiative and activism. The choice of the poster as a medium is, I think, adapted to the recipient: individuals of various ages and social backgrounds, living in a relatively small suburbian town, knowing each other from seeing.We created the blog with the intention to pass over its administration to (one of ) the parents. The mother of one of the most loyal users of the centre has manifested interest in this activity. We offered to return to Erith to introduce her to the practice of blogging. We set up open comments with a possibility for the administrator to edit/delete inappropriate or abusive interventions.The aim of the campaign is to encourage individual participation in public affairs, through stimuli and tools legible and accessible to a great number of Erith residents.

Agonistic


Pierre Papet

Solve a conflict KBC edition

My response addresses the lack of communication between the different parties involved in the conflict. “Solve a conflict KBC edition” is a tool - in the form of a board game - allowing each party to perceive the level of satisfaction of the other.The board is made of three parts: a timer, alternative cards and a tension scale. The timer has to be set up at the beginning of the game session and will divide the consultation time by three. Like a chess timer, it allows each player - i.e. party - to have the same amount of speaking time.Each player has a token linked to the others by an elastic band representing the tension between each participant. Throughout the game, players see the conflict evolve on the tension scale and use the alternative cards to make and rate new propositions. These alternative cards can help building a basis for the future of the Ken Boyce Center.“Solve a conflict” encourages the creation of an agonistic space in which each conflict party can have their say, in a regimented though playful manner.

Agonistic


Martyna Bielecka

Pigeons

On the balconies of the council estates of Warsaw, pigeons trigger heated conflicts. Inhabitants of block-flats are sometimes given a small part of the outside world: a balcony. This space, rarely larger than one square meter, can soon become the epicentre of territorial conflicts, opposing pro- and contra-pigeon neighbours.In this type of architecture, neighbours don’t meet very often. Typically, polish council estates have two entrances/exits, making it very easy for inhabitants to elude conflicts.Pigeons are the third party in this conflict, and could thus be used as a mean of communication - a job they have been trained for during centuries. “Pigeons” is a platform for indirect communication situated in a common area of the building, including a board and a set of pigeon-shaped building blocks. Positive or negative emotions are written on each pigeon. People can express themselves with the proposed medium as well as build something together.My aim wasn’t to solve the problem of pigeon feeding/hating but to propose a space where both parties could meet (even if not in person) and interact.

Agonistic

The Neighbourhood

Rémi Perrichon

Happy Flat website

What is (a) neighbourhood? Is it the whole district in which one lives, or rather what we can see and hear from our windows?I started playing Sims to experience different levels of neighbourhood. At first, I didn’t have enough money to run several houses, which is why I decided to put all my characters together in a flatshare. I made them step in to say hello, invite each other over, launch group gardening sessions. All these activities, essential to this game, upgraded my marks. This virtual life was a reflection of the existence and routine of many Londoners. To cope with the high accommodation costs, students as well as professionals have to share flats.Back in real life, I set up a questionnaire, divided in four different parts (space, time, sound, conflict) which led me to the conclusion that if people live together, they often don’t share a lot. They have different schedules, lifestyles, cleaning habits but also a great variety of skills.My concept is a flatshare gaming website - an e-agonistic space to accommodate and articulate difference.It provides a communication platform, a conflict agora and a pool to share skills and experiences, and finally a system of assessment and rewarding of the efforts made by and for the community.

Agonistic

The Neighbourhood

Ian Thomas

Noisy neighbours - The Sound Proof Booth

Noise complaints are common in city neighbourhoods. But is noise the genuine cause of these conflicts or one of the consequences of a broader issue?For personal and professional reasons, people move to large cities, contributing to the densification of megalopolises like London. Old town houses, originally designed to house five or six people, are now divided into three or four flats and shelter up to double if not triple the planned amount of inhabitants. These people often lead varied lifestyles, built around different schedules. With enhanced communication technologies, workplace and living space merge. Monday to Friday, nine-to-five jobs are not common anymore - boundaries between work and spare time, between conventional and divergent working hours disappear. In this complex context, proximity is presumably the underlying issue and cause of neighbourhood conflicts, and noise a mere symptom thereof.

A possible response to this ‘wicked’ situation is the Sound Proof Booth. This noise-insulating cell, delivered in a flat pack, gives users the opportunity to obtain that silence they so deeply crave within their home. While the assembly of the booth may be quite noisy, the efforts of the builder are rewarded by the gain of a confined, claustrophobia-inducing space. The Sound Proof Booth suggests to the user that instead of isolating oneself and accumulating frustration, one should strive to communicate and directly address the problem.

Critical

The Neighbourhood

Yi Zhou

Neighbourhood Bins

Following conversations with a mediator from Camden Town Community, a policeman and a resident of the borough of Hackney, I realised that many neighbourhood conflicts arise from... garbage bins.Residents find their bins always full - though not with their own rubbish - which leads them to also dispose of their waste in other neighbours’ bins. This vicious circle nourishes anger, day by day, bag by bag. Apart from the accumulation of garbage in one’s bin, the actual conflict is invisible and there is few chance to catch the “offenders” in action.My response to this is to materialise the conflict and to use semi-transparent plastic bins tainted in a colour gradient symbolising the level of anger - from blue, green, yellow to red. The idea is to show clearly how full the bin is and link this with the possible consequences of overfilling someone else’s garbage container. The bins function as a warning and an invitation to rethink one’s actions.

Empathetic

The Neighbourhood

Rahul Boggaram

Antonym Virus

Cyber-bullying is a significant problem costing the UK £18 million a year with 350,000 children cyber-bullied. The focus of the action against cyber-bullying is often put on repairing the damages rather than preventing them. Mapping the feelings of trolls (cyber offenders) and bullies revealed an urgent need for more empathy. The saying ‘Be good do good’ lead me to the idea of a virus infecting nasty comments by finding and posting the antonyms of the words used by the troll on the social network wall of his/her victim. In return, the initial mean comment would be posted on the troll’s own wall.

Empathetic

The School

Jing Luo

Self-bullied

Victims of cyber-bullying are often young individuals, highly familiar with Internet social network platforms such as facebook, twitter, et c. For the general public, it is hard to comprehend the motivations of offenders, whilst difficult to understand the depth of the feelings and emotions experienced by bullies - how it can, in some cases, lead to suicide.

Immersed in a confined empathy cabin, outsiders can alternatively play the role of the offender and of the victim. A computer connected to a fictional social network is placed in the cell - the user can post mean comments to the person they decide to virtually bully. At this moment, the cabin becomes very dark and the temperature drops, jeers resonate from speakers installed in the space - which allows the user to viscerally feel the emotions a victim may experience.

Empathetic

The School

Liliana Simões Carvalho

The Card. What Card?

Video

This project focuses on the tensions between liberty and security in the Granary Building, home of Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design.We identified the ID card as a materialisation of the university security system. Interviews helped us defining two antagonistic user groups: a first cohort of students, general staff and visitors - recipients and users of the security system - and a second group of duty holders (Head of College, Facilities Department) who provide the security system, whilst also being users. Two diverging reactions to the ID card could be profiled: suspicion (industrial city/ collective regime) or hope (inspiration city/ singular regime). Both groups have the same appraisal of the importance of security issues and share similar frustrations regarding the flaws of the system.

The ID card conflict at Central Saint Martins can be characterised as a public dispute. According to pragmatic sociologists Boltanski and Thévenot, a public dispute takes place when two or more groups of actors have different opinions on the same matter but are determined to reach social consensus through an exchange of justifications or reasons. The authors add that the aim of these public discussions is to get an agreement between different axiological subsystems and avoid social conflicts. If we set an increased communication between the two parties and an emphasis on their common values as our aim, then empathy seems to be the right strategy. In a parodic short film, a simulacrum of the situation, two characters restlessly argue about a card, unable to articulate clearer arguments than “- Where’s your card? - What card?”. This video is the premiss of a live performance “The Card. What Card?”, scheduled on the opening night of the project exhibition, taking place at College.CCTV cameras record the flow of arriving guests, systematically asked by a performer to show a card when passing the gates. Unaware of the necessity to have a card to get access, the guests will respond spontaneously to this unexpected demand. The CCTV records are broadcasted in the exhibition space, with a five minutes delay. The purpose of this apparatus is to generate a discussion among the guests and promote an exchange of ideas and opinions around the ID card, i.e. the security system.

Empathetic

The Workplace

Alexandra Sidorenko

Smuggle

Video

The strict security system of the university forbids to bring in any guests. Students’ attempts to show their workplace to their parents are not crowned with success. For family members, the desire to see where their loved one spends their day - and family funds - is not mere curiosity. Rather, it is care, attention and the need to calm anxiety. Furthermore, one could argue that the isolation of the College from the outer world contradicts the agenda and essence of arts and design : articulate the beauty of the world in fresh ideas, in a perpetual intellectual and aesthetic back and forth.Arts and design students often transport bulky pieces of luggage containing their tools, materials or finished work. Security personal never control the contents of these bags and cases. Why couldn’t we take full advantage of our creativity needs and luggage freedom and simply smuggle our relatives in?Smuggle is a suitcase large enough to contain a human being in seating position - absolutely banal on the outside, it reveals an oxygen mask, an oxygen tank and lighting in the inside. Inner padding and casing make the seating as comfortable as possible.

Critical

The Workplace

Chun-Ling Wu

The Mask

Video

In the Granary building, the security system doesn’t merely controls the access to the building, but also inside the building - with their ID card, users (students and staff) get access to a specific set of rooms. This spatial control system is linked with an array of services available (or not) throughout the university: borrowing books from the library, scanning, copying and printing documents, parking bicycles in the basement of the college, et c. Every door is equipped with a card reader.This extensive network of control and services has primarily been implemented to secure the building and prevent ‘tourist’ theft. The status of this system is clearly ambivalent, as well as the boundaries between virtual and physical identity.In the building, we all become our cards, we are nothing without our cards. We become cyborgs, our identities augmented by our ID chips. We become faceless.

The mask raises this issue, and lets people question the frontiers between self and technology, individual wellbeing and common good.

Critical

The Workplace

Cai Jun Yang

SmartCard Black-market

In the brand new Granary Building, much conflict arises from the reluctance of users towards the use of the SmartCard system - felt as a misanthropic control machine. On the other hand, the SmartCard duty holders have to maintain security and prevent external theft. The dystopian fiction of the rise of a smartcard black-market stimulates critical thinking about the balance between liberty and security. It helps users and duty holders understand each other better. Probes from this future illegal ID card market question the limits of contemporary security systems.

Critical

The Workplace

Video

Business

Design for Difference - Student Work