Threats and hopes for abandoned buildings in Berlin: an urban exploration approach

Abandoned buildings have become a distinguishing mark for the recent history and alternative spirit of Berlin. The growth in popularity of urban exploration, which focuses in illegally trespassing these neglected places, has made Berlin a hotspot for such a subculture, whose practitioners express an extreme sensibility about the current and future state of the buildings they explore. Through this perspective, the present article identifies three main threats towards the buildings: a touristification phenomenon created by urban exploration; commodification as a result of this touristification; and the increasing gentrification in the city that ignores the tangible and intangible qualities of the buildings. By critically reviewing these aspects, the article concludes proposing ‘informal re-appropriation’ as an integrated solution that prioritizes public participation and slow urban development over neoliberal immediate revenues, where minimal interventions contribute to preserve Berlin’s unique aesthetics embedded in its abandoned buildings

An aesthetics of touch: investigating the language of design relating to form

How well can designers communicate qualities of touch? This paper presents evidence that they have some capability to do so, much of which appears to have been learned, but at present make limited use of such language. Interviews with graduate designer-makers suggest that they are aware of and value the importance of touch and materiality in their work, but lack a vocabulary to fully relate to their detailed explanations of other aspects such as their intent or selection of materials. We believe that more attention should be paid to the verbal dialogue that happens in the design process, particularly as other researchers show that even making-based learning also has a strong verbal element to it. However, verbal language alone does not appear to be adequate for a comprehensive language of touch. Graduate designers-makers’ descriptive practices combined non-verbal manipulation within verbal accounts. We thus argue that haptic vocabularies do not simply describe material qualities, but rather are situated competences that physically demonstrate the presence of haptic qualities. Such competencies are more important than groups of verbal vocabularies in isolation. Design support for developing and extending haptic competences must take this wide range of considerations into account to comprehensively improve designers’ capabilities

Touch in the Helping Professions

Inappropriate touch cases have sparked public outcry and made headlines, but a discussion on the importance and ethics of positive, caring, appropriate touch in the helping professions such as teaching, nursing and counselling is long overdue

Wonder, Aesthetics, and Ethics: A Meditation on Technological Thinking, Psychical Distance, and the Moral Imagination

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College

An Elementary Art Curriculum for Private/Parochial Schools

This project is written with the hopes of offering assistance to the private/parochial schools that either have not committed themselves to an art program or that are floundering within stagnating commitments or those that need stimulus to think about the benefits of an art curriculum. The seed thoughts for this project were first planted when the author began teaching in a private school and observed first hand curriculum deficiences in local private/parochial schools. The author conducted a survey of similarly founded schools which led to suspicions that art curriculum of the private/parochial elementary schools in the State of Washington are inadequate

Journey to the Centre of the Museum: Cognitive, Object and Introspective User Experiences in a Design Museum

This thesis applies an ethnographic approach to investigate museum visit practices, which shape user experiences in a design museum. Specifically, it explores individual users’ meaning making processes through the embodiment of thoughts and lived experiences. To frame the study, it takes on a phenomenological approach to investigate how the body, self, space, and objects relate with each other in the phenomenon of museum going. Four main questions guide the paper. First, why do users go the museum? Second, how do users interact and navigate the museum? Third, how do the senses influence the users’ interaction and navigation practices? And fourth, how do users create meanings of the different museum affordances that facilitate lived experiences? By using phenomenology as theory and a bricolage of qualitative methods, it becomes possible to uncover the relationship of users’ previous knowledge in setting the trajectory and navigation practices for their journey to and within the museum. This includes how they navigate and orient themselves in space. It can be argued that different users have different experiences in the same museum, but this study clearly identifies the touchpoints in the user journey where disparities in user experiences occur due to asymmetric stimuli and associations. Moreover, thickly describing what users see and feel in the museum can contribute in the growing field of user-centered design and cultural administration and enable similar organisations to understand how users experience the such institutions or leisure spaces