Grassland Interview: Drawing the Prairie Workshop

Drawing the Prairie Workshop” is driven by a central question: How do we authentically bring arts and sciences together to promote understanding of grasslands? The project brings Wiersma’s large scale drawings on paper together with recorded interviews of scientists and land managers collected by Kingery-Page. While this artistic collaboration is experienced in galleries, the project also engages people of the region, in a variety of settings, to build their understanding of grasslands through drawing of grassland plants.Grasslands provide essential ecosystem services, such as groundwater recharge, water quality improvement, pollinator habitat, and carbon sequestration. But worldwide, the outlook for conservation of grasslands is bleak: just 45% remain, and only a little over 4% of these are in a protected status.The faculty team invites a broad public to experience the workshop they have offered in locations across the state of Kansas. During 2019-2020, the workshops reached more than 240 people

Site as experiential playground: artistic research for a learning landscape

The contemporary American schoolyard remains an under-utilized opportunity for experiential learning. Contemporary public schoolyards are often designed in response to perceptions of liability and a limited interpretation of child development. This paper examines a design proposal for an un-built, natural learning landscape through two lenses: epistemology and form. First, we propose that designers of school landscapes embrace artistic research as a humanities mode of knowledge. We illustrate an artistic research process using the design of an experiential schoolyard. Second, we present an un-built, primary grade schoolyard design as an exemplar for natural play and learning. Beginning with literature review of research on play and experiential learning, the proposed design layers child development, humanities, and landscape architectural knowledge to form a provisional understanding of how form and space may affect the child’s play experience

Examples of adapted ethnographic approaches for participatory design

Citation: Kingery-Page, K., Glastetter, A., DeOrsey, D., and J.Falcone (2016)."Examples of adapted ethnographic approaches for participatory design. Landscape Research Record, 5.In landscape architecture practice, participatory design approaches emphasize community workshops and charrettes. But marginalized voices are often suppressed during group meetings, if those at the margins are invited at all. To expand inclusion in the design process, we propose adapting classic ethnographic methods such as one-on-one interviews and direct observation. The benefit of adapted ethnography is that it gives us first-person accounts of a place and of people’s needs. Adapted ethnographic methods allow designers to observe how people really use and feel about places, and are well-suited to one-on-one interactions with stakeholders. Although ethnographic methods can be usefully adapted to landscape architecture processes, this adaptation differs from true ethnography. Developing an ethnographic narrative is a deep and long term endeavor, often occupying the majority of an ethnographer’s career. To adapt ethnographic methods for use during a relatively short period of time, a spatial designer must limit the inquiry to a specific “lens” or particular question related to the community design at hand. Recently, we used an adapted ethnographic approach in the design process for a temporary park and associated streetscape in a Midwestern city with slightly less than a half million residents. We sought to understand downtown resident’s lived experiences downtown, their perceptions of downtown place identity, and what they most valued in a temporary park

Management practices for the amelioration of urban stormwater

AbstractUrban runoff has been identified as a non-point source (NPS) contributor. The most effective mechanism for controlling urban NPS pollution is to reduce the amount of runoff through infiltration and storage on the landscape. Traditional infiltration best management practices (BMPs) have lacked long-term effectiveness because of clogging. The addition of vegetation to the system enhances the longevity of infiltration BMPs by enhancing soil structure. In order to better understand the design and function of vegetated, infiltration-based BMPs, Kansas State University is monitoring several sites in Kansas. Results indicate that vegetation enhances the ability of stormwater systems to store water and reduce down channel erosion and flooding

New Kansas Roots for Students: building cultural competency through the Nicodemus Project

Five-member panel (two faculty members representing two supporting professional disciplines; Nicodemus resident and on campus resource; a MLA graduate student; and a graduate planner) recapping how the Parks for the People/Nicodemus project transformed students and community members. Short segments of video demonstrating student learning outcomes associated with diversity and collaboration will be introduced. This project won the CECD Engagement Award from Kansas State University in 2013. (270-word abstract uploaded

Scholarly Communication Task Force Report and Recommendations

To address issues resulting from the serials crisis at Kansas State University, Provost Charles Taber, Faculty Senate President Tanya González, and Dean of Libraries Lori Goetsch created the Scholarly Communication Task Force during the 2019 fall semester. The purpose of this task force is to gather stakeholders in the K-State community to review the current landscape of scholarly communication practices on campus and offer recommendations to improve not only access to information at K-State but direct our institutional participation in the movement toward open scholarship. The task force reviewed scholarly communication initiatives at K-State and other higher education institutions and sought input from the campus community. Based on this information, the task force made several recommendations with accompanying budget implications. Recognizing that maintaining the status quo is not fiscally sustainable, we make the following recommendations: • We recommend that the University adopt an Open Access Policy to self-archive articles that it produces • We recommend the Library continue to monitor/manage subscription efficiencies • We recommend greater usage of interlibrary loan as an option for materials not subscribed to by K-State Libraries, while transitioning to transformational agreements and multipayer models • We recommend changes to how research is evaluated based on best practices • We recommend that faculty to write publication costs into their grant proposals • We recommend, continuing the Open Access fee fund, only if it is fully funded and higher priority recommendations are adequately supported Additional information about the task force’s findings and process for gathering information from the campus community are included later in this report

What you see is not always what you get: A qualitative, comparative analysis of ex ante visualizations with ex post photography of landscape and architectural projects

This study presents a qualitative, comparative analysis of ex ante visualizations, created during planning and design phases, with ex post photography of landscape and architectural projects. Visualizations play an increasingly important role as decision-making tools in the planning process and are expected to successfully communicate proposals to both experts and laypersons. Outside of the wind farm industry there is a lack of detailed guidance for those creating landscape visualizations and currently no method of analyzing the accuracy of visualizations exists. In a world where we increasingly rely on information communicated in a visual manner itis imperative that potential viewers are provided with clues to enable them to distinguish between what is real and what is not. This study analyses a selection of visualizations from a cross section of landscape and architectural projects and reveals reoccurring patterns of inconsistencies in the depiction of content elements. The control of production through agreed guidelines proposed by previously published research could have both positive and negative effects for the future of visualization production. This research proposes that the starting point for honest communication lies in transparency, in both production techniques and presentation to clients, stakeholders and the public. There is scope for more in depth image analysis of a larger body of projects that may reveal more detailed findings that could contribute to future guideline discussions

The Post-Modern Analytique

The 'analytique' is a Beaux-Arts approach to teaching design principles through an 'order problem' which relies on the analysis and representation of built work. The term 'analytique' refers to the product of a student's study: a carefully composed and drawn expression of the solution, emphasizing the relationship of parts to the whole, and of details to overall proportions. This paper presents a post-modern approach to the analytique. The post-modern analytique expresses the nature of current practice in landscape architecture: pluralistic in meaning, expressed through layered references and materials, and focused upon 'ideas, not authors.' This paper first presents an overview of the Beaux-Arts analytique and then defines 'post-modern.' Examples of student analytique projects, made using both traditional and digital media, illustrate the post-modern approach to the analytique

Landscape and Contemporary Art: Overlap, Disregard, and Relevance

Landscape, viewed for centuries by the art world as either an inspirational source for art or as a kind of decorative art, emerged with a new prominence during the twentieth century. Artists and landscape architects now share a realm of overlapping practice. By understanding contemporary art as a body of knowledge and art itself as a ‘mode of knowledge,’ students, educators, and practitioners of landscape architecture can compete more effectively with other ‘form-givers’ in 21st century culture. Art as a mode of knowledge is often disregarded within landscape architecture, in favor of seemingly more analytical approaches to design research dilemmas. Using examples of 20th and 21st century urban art, I argue for art as a mode of knowledge relevant to current landscape architecture practices. I demonstrate the results of applying normative artistic research to a student design project