Designing a Workshop: The Benefits of Non-Place

UK research institutions are alive with workshops this year. The British funding councils that support HCI, design and usability work in universities have been giving out seed money in a series of calls. Recipients are charged with exploring chosen up-and-coming research areas, making recommendations about key questions in these fields and bringing together researchers and practitioners who may submit bids in the future. "Designing for the 21st Century" was one such call, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), with some 20 clusters funded under its auspices.

Top of the agenda for successful bidders are three activities: constructing workshops, writing reports and organising a final conference or symposium.

The reports and conferences can be fairly standard since both are essentially included to help with dissemination (although see UN story: The Shape of Conferences to Come). But that just won't do for the workshops…

A number of features distinguish the workshops appearing as part of these programmes from the standard model:
• The intention is to discover what might be, rather than hear what has already happened;
• Collaboration is desirable outside the workshop series as well as within each session;
• They primarily involve only signed-up members of the cluster, though new members are welcomed;
• The same people – though not exactly the same people – meet regularly; and
• Events number up to four a year.

These conditions require clusters to be resourceful about their workshops. Unlike the open-call workshops that typically accompany conferences to allow for the presentation of research findings in an informal atmosphere, the goal is less to provide an opportunity to publish and share progress in the field, and more to create a new field from scratch. A day of individuals presenting recent research in 20 slides, so characteristic of academic workshops, would achieve little.

One cluster, "Orienting The Future: Design Strategies For Non-Place" (see link below), has taken a particularly inventive route to meeting this challenge. 'Non-place' is a term coined by French anthropologist Marc Augé for describing the places that we spend much of our time: urban environments such as airports, supermarkets, motorways, hotels, and offices. This cluster's goal is 'to develop resources that address a specific contemporary design problem: making ordinary urban spaces more accessible, friendly and useable'. Already at conception, the bid team had resolved to organise three site-specific workshops in non-places.

The first was at a B&Q Warehouse near Edinburgh in February. This was the 'consumer non place' (see an example of the output). The second has just taken place at Stansted Airport: a 'transport non place' – more of that in another UN story. The final one is scheduled for May, to be the 'bureaucratic non place'.

Instead of providing a neutral space, as most organisers strive to do, and so allowing focus to fall upon the work taking place in the room, these non place events look outwards: they are about interaction with the environment.

Just what one would expect from a cluster in which the discipline of architecture is well represented? Maybe. But to dismiss this ingenuity as the preserve of those interested in the built environment is to miss the point…

…No need to worry about what people will talk about and why. No contrived team-bonding activities required. And very little danger of boredom or repetition. Designing activities for the participants is almost redundant. All anyone needs is a small team to explore in and some time to chew over the findings of the day. The research ideas follow.

That said, it is also worth looking at the Non-Place pre-arrival exercise. It is suggested that people attending 'use their own journey as a starting point for considering wayfinding and orientation conventions and technologies'. Participants are asked to record their journey and its wayfinding logics in any way comfortable to them, ready to talk about it later.

Several things can be noted about an exercise of this type, the first of which is that it doesn't involve time that wouldn't anyway be spent on the workshop. For instance, one participant turned up at the B&Q store with the rubbish he'd accumulated in driving from home to Edinburgh and stopping for snacks at service stations on the way. Not a task that seeks to encourage familiarisation through the reading of other people's position statements, then. Again, engagement happens through heightened awareness of naturally occurring interactions. In addition, it allows participants to be creative – warming them up to think freshly about the world, and possibly also to have fun.

Anything out of the ordinary has the potential to be fascinating to some people and scary to others. Not every cluster has the stomach for a home improvement superstore, an airport and an immigration centre. That's not the point. The point is working out what fits the theme of the research and the style of the people involved… and then making form follow content.

[This article will be followed with one that describes the Stansted workshop in some detail, looking at the experience of attending such a differently formatted event and the research themes that emerged.]

Associated Link: Orienting The Future: Design Strategies For Non-Place

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