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

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

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

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

Shades of Comfort: Privacy and the Street

Conditions of pedestrian comfort have been evaluated by other researchers as they relate to climate, protection from vehicles, and spatial conditions of the street. But in a discourse that emphasizes the public nature of the street, privacy is seldom addressed. A person’s ability to regulate privacy, both in seclusion and in public, is an aspect of personal freedom. Privacy occurs and is necessary in public space, especially in dense urban environments, where privacy indoors may be limited. Privacy is a complex phenomenon dependant above all upon the individual’s desired level of privacy. The researcher uses working definitions of privacy and exposure based upon social, psychological, and legal definitions. Beginning with the theory that achieving a desired level of privacy has a profound effect on the comfort of a person on the street, the researcher identifies and describes factors that allow for privacy regulation on the street. This exploratory research uses a phenomenological method of systematically noting subjective responses to the street setting

Hearing questions: Deep Listening to Identify Community Needs in Open Space Design

Kingery-Page and her students in landscape architecture work with communities to plan and design open spaces. These service-learning efforts often begin before a project is funded or even clearly envisioned. The student/faculty team sees their role as deep listening, using adapted ethnographic (interviews and observation) and humanities methods (archival research and projective design) to understand community identity, needs, and vision. Two recent urban examples, the ICT Pop-Up Urban Park and Chester Lewis Park in Wichita, Kansas exemplify the participatory design methods used by this team

Case Studies of Low-Energy Homes and Sites in Northeastern Kansas and Kansas City Metropolitan Area

Low-energy housing is defined as housing that conserves both source (energy used off-site) and site energy through a variety of strategies, including a reduction in the use of purchased energy and conscious use of materials and techniques that reduce the embodied energy cost of the home and site.While low-energy housing has been extensively studied by the US Green Building Council and others, research tends to focus upon technologies used in the construction of homes, rather than the full optimization of site and building relationships. In order to explore optimal site-structure relationships for low-energy housing and introduce early design students to fundamental case study practices, three faculty members led a total of forty-four students in a study of three sites. The resulting case study sites include homes ranging in building cost from $150,00-$600,000 and employing a variety of both passive and active energy saving techniques. The case studies can be characterized as: a high-design urban lot home, a rural "earthship" home, and a suburban LEED platinum-certified retirement home. This interdisciplinary research effort included forty-one undergraduate students and three graduate students, all of whom were just beginning the interior architecture and product design program or the landscape architecture program at Kansas State University. The case study pedagogy employed experiential learning during site visits and in the context of teamwork between the two disciples. Students and professors visited the three low‐energy homes on a one day field trip in Kansas and Missouri. The case studies’goal was to shed light on the interplay between interior (building) concerns and exterior (site) concerns in the creation of low‐energy environments that are functional and beautiful. The authors wish to thank Kansas State University for supporting this effort through a university small research grant