The first project of the year we received was all about design research. Why is something designed in a specific way. Our task is to undertake a design research project recording, analysing and visualising situations where people are ordered, filtered, sorted or controlled by designed systems and infrastructures of space. I partnered with Nevena, Kasia and Ania for this project. We decided to focus our research on the entrance of the Tate Modern. When we got there, we spend an hour studying those using the area. The first thing we noticed was how the area seemed to be segregated into four sections.
Area by the Millennium Bridge
The main area
Café
Park
The sketch below shows the area as a whole, and how we believe it was separated. Maybe this was not the intention of the areas design, but it felt like the area was trying to be separated.
Ways we believed the area had been successfully separated was through the use of manmade barriers. For example, the benches in the area were placed on the outskirts, which acted like a barrier, whilst also leaving more space for groups and congregations and possibly stop people from feeling like space is too crowded. Furthermore, the implementation of metal poles, which separated the river pedestrian route and the Tate. We also noticed how natural barriers were used in combination with manmade. A plot of trees, spanning 20 meters was used as a wall to direct the flow of people and prevent them walking through. It was very weird to notice how much ‘they’ didn’t want people to walk through the trees into the park.
All of these fit under the arrangement of things in the space and had a significant effect on how individuals interacted with the area. We noticed that the direction of flow followed the shortest path from Millennium bridge of the entrance of the Tate. The sketch below shows this. The dark blue line shows how those from the bridge route cut through the area diagonally.
What is encouraging this flow?
The structure of the area! The open space in the middle allows individuals to walk diagonally as there is nothing in the way. Moreover, the trees are acting like a natural barrier. Another factor of this route is the close entrance on the right. Maybe if this was also opened, the flow would be different.
We then spent some time looking at the activities taking place in the area. We concluded that most people were just moving through the space and were not interacting with it. However, there were some. For example, the image below shows socialisation between people on sitting on the benches. Some also using their devices, and some resting.
The activity we noticed most often were the organised tours taking place for schol children and tourists. We would find these groups of people group up in a circle and discuss their activities for the day ahead.
As mentioned above, one invisible system that we noticed was the movement of people. Did people realise the route they were taking was the shortest? Or were they just following the people in front of them?
Conducting Interviews
We went to the Tate Modern to conduct research on how people are using the space outside. First, we decided to conduct some interviews however, we felt the information that we collected wasn’t very useful. It wasn’t useful because many of the individuals didn’t understand what we were asking them first. We had to explain in depth what we were doing. And when we did, the responses to the questions seemed very forced. For example, when asked what they would change about the area, many didn’t know what to say so when we suggested somethings, they just agreed with us.
As a result of this decided to take a different approach. We went to the terraces on the north face of the gallery, overlooking the square and recorded the flow of people from both sides to get a good idea of how people were moving across the area, and how they use it in relation to the other sections within, the cafe and park.
Listed below are the questions posed to those passing by:
Are you visiting the Tate today/have you already?
If not, what are you doing in the area?
Is there anything that annoys you about the space?
When you visit the area, do you interact with the café, park?
Is there anything you would change about the space?
Most of who we asked had been to the Tate before, however there were some whose first time it was. For example, a woman with her 10-year-old daughter.
The majority of the respondents said they had no issue with the area. ‘Why should there be?’ one woman asked back. Another woman did mention that she would prefer for the cafe to be inside, even though there are already a few cafes inside which maybe she didn’t know.
People wanted to see more signs in the space which showed them where to go. There was also a request for more greenery, ‘trees’.
Further Research
These are the video recordings, which document movement in the area, we made:
We took these recordings and reviewed them to generate some statistical data. We played the videos carefully and recorded the amount of people travelling in the area. We plotted this data in a small data visualisation seen below.
This data vis was purely for our own benefit. It helped us understand how people where moving, and what the preferred path was, statistically, even though you can clearly see a preferred path just by watching the video. We wanted to implement this data into our artefact.
The artefact
Implicit or explicit? – We had ideas for both.
This sketch shows our explicit approach. As we noticed the movement differs from each section, our idea was to create a poster showing this and the data we collected.
The sketch above shows our implicit approach. The idea was to place an item in the middle of the area. What we wanted to see was how the public would react to this. Will it make them take a different route? There are many factors to this. What are we placing in the middle? Is it just a cardboard box. Of course, this would just be ignored. If we want people to stop, it would need to be something eyecatchy.
We decided that the artefact would be… ourselves! We have a picnic in front of the Tate! This is what we were going to do. We went with a combination of the two approaches. Whilst we have our picnic, we would give out a poster documenting our findings.
The Posters
This is how we designed our posters. Both of them feature the paths taken in the background, with the main route emphasised in the foreground. In this first poster (left) this was done through our choice of colour. We used red, in contrast with grey for the other routes which are visible in the background. This poster also plays with the route direction itself. As the hypothesis we went with was to analyse whether we could get people to change their movements by going around us, this is shown where the red line makes a sudden change in direction, following a semi-circle shape.
In the right poster, we showed movement through icons of foot prints and their opacity. Making it more visible meant it was a route taken by many. This poster also includes the other roots. The figure showing how many took that route in a 10 minute period was placed beside.
Our classmates seemed to like the left poster more than the right. This is what we understood from our final crit. ‘It is clearer’ one person thought. The black poster seemed more complicated because the statistics looked like they were places arbitrarily, so it was harder to comprehend.
Picnic at the Tate
Sunday was the day of our picnic. I had prepared my picnic blanket and packed it in my bag, along with some treats. Sadly, it rained all day. This ruined our plan and what we wanted to achieve as our artefact!
As a result, we acted quickly and didn’t let the day go to waste. To make sure that we had something for the next day (crit day), we decided the best thig to do was give out our posters to those passing by. The images below show us doing so.
We didn’t draw much attention to ourselves this way. I do believe we would have made a bigger impact if we managed to have our picnic, nevertheless, we did talk to some individuals who were interested in what we were presenting them, even though the majority just took a poster and walked away.
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