Designing a Workshop: A Journey from Design to Use

This is the partner piece to UN story: Designing a Workshop: The Benefits of Non-Place. If that piece was about design, then this is about use. Enough to say here that below is an account of attending the "Orienting The Future: Design Strategies For Non-Place" cluster's transport non-place workshop. It demonstrates the richness of taking workshop participants out of the standard meeting room. That the chosen alternative was a day at Stansted Airport... well, how could I resist?

My day of non-places began early with the London Underground. We had been asked to complete a pre-workshop task that involved recording something about 'wayfinding and orientating' on our journey to the event. I chose to look at the way that 'glancing' behaviours guide us as we move through shared spaces. I'd found materials to prepare myself:
Etiquette for Travellers on the London Underground and Underground Etiquette . Both explained just where glancing was and wasn't acceptable (don't stare and don't read other people's books), but I was more interested in those incidental checking moments of which we are probably not aware.

Crossing London, I learnt a bit about how we manage ourselves and others through glance. Much of this I won't share with you, but two things are worth a mention here. The first is that I sat for most of the trip next to someone who was annotating a print-out which revealed she works for the same small organisation as a good friend of mine. Because she ignored my glancing; because etiquette on the tube dictates that you don't talk (even if you have been reading other people's materials); because I noticed her only, I suspect, because I was doing my wayfinding task and not reading a book, I didn't speak. Instead, I reflected that what I wanted was a virtual means to nudge both this woman and my friend Val and set up a three-way exclamation of 'Now, what's the chance of that happening on the London Underground and her from Sheffield too?'.

The second encounter occurred when I was already near our meeting point in the airport's Arrivals section.

One of the drawbacks of unorthodox workshop locations is lack of formal structures for assembling people who don't recognise each other. I saw a woman whom I believed might well be part of our number. We made eye contact twice, but didn't act on it. Not till someone else had recognised both of us did we meet and acknowledge our reticence. Meanwhile, up in Scotland, eight researchers stranded at Edinburgh Airport were also wishing that they had some way of discreetly identifying people with the common interest of getting to Stansted for the workshop. A theme was emerging: unobtrusive contact on the move and lack of provision for it.

Led by the big obtrusive cardboard sign that two participants were carrying as part of their wayfinding task, saying 'Non-place?', a group did gather at the appointed time. But the organisation committee was largely absent: expected 8am, now due 11.03. This could have happened at any workshop anywhere; that it happened at Stansted made it potentially poetic instead of just annoying. Fortunately, the location provided enough inspiration to substitute for the introductory presentation still in Scotland... a bonus of picking somewhere intrinsically interesting to have an event.

It is now 10am. So the event begins, in a free-form way, elegantly improvised by the one steering group member present. We make an examination of the conference room – buried under the airport and linked by a dour grey staircase straight out of "Die Hard 2", the movie thriller in which an airport is held hostage. (The other movie reference of the day is Spielberg's recent film, "The Terminal" in which a man gets trapped at an airport building – this feels increasingly resonant over the next 12 hours.)

We introduce ourselves – several people with an interest in motorway services, a few architecture academics, a couple of computer scientists, a sprinkling of artists – and leave quickly to explore more colourful parts. Small groups form and ours decides to follow trolleys around, establishing their routes through the airport to connect with new Arrivals or Departures traffic. Then we shadow a group of German marathon runners on their way out of the airport; one with a German flag stained into her hair. Having been led to the ground floor for the trains, we decide to navigate our way back at this level to our conference room. Would we meet trouble by stepping out of the paths meant for the public?

No, but another group, following shortly behind us, is stopped by the police, reprimanded and made to fill out forms. After that, the BAA public relations man asks us to stay in allocated places.

This was the start of the second theme of the day: control and resistance. About now, the rest of the workshop arrives, tired by a 4.30am start whose value has been negated by delay, and we all set off on the official tour.

We are assigned to members of staff with yellow coats and high clearance. We are given temporary passes to go 'airside'. The staff are tense and disapproving to impress upon us the seriousness of the undertaking and how tight security is since 9/11. One chap falls foul immediately by asking too many questions in the security room.

We are shown around the 'landside' part of the airport – Arrivals and Departures, which at Stansted are on the same level; the chute for 'out of gauge' items; the extension built for overflow and so that El Al, the Israeli airline that comes in three times a week, can fill the section with their own security systems, machinery and experts. We are not shown the luggage layer beneath our feet where automatic sorting of baggage takes up the whole floor.

Then we are fed through the system that takes merchandise and sales staff from the landside to the airside, supplying the duty-free world of glamorous shopping and caviar bars. We are scanned and searched and our coats are searched too. We are not allowed to take photos, but a thousand security cameras are ensuring that someone somewhere has a record of this moment.

Leaving this stern white avenue for the glitter of the departure lounge, we discuss the charade of airport security. All the evidence indicates that technology is no challenge to people who would act subversively (see, for instance, UN story: The Register reviews Progress on the American anti-Terrorist Software on how technology is potentially making flying less secure). Later we hear that it is people, not gadgets, that spot incipient problems, usually by detecting atypical behaviour. Our guide in yellow relaxes as we stand watching planes take off from the satellite building and tells horror stories: 'The flight staff hadn't seen the baby move in 12 hours so they reported it and customs found that the baby was dead and stuffed with drugs.'

But Non-Place isn't investigating policing mechanisms. Instead, the need for control, both of people and revenues, comes up as context and constraint in our next exercise. We are in small groups again, back on landside. Some people are off to look for plane-spotters; others to consider the awkward relationship between the architecture, the signage and the myriad of High Street concessions selling forgotten toothbrushes and last-minute pairs of sandals. My group is concerned to explore social and collective behaviour and what infrastructure supports it. We are going to think about gadgets to encourage linking up.

I reflect upon my typical airport behaviour – completing the technicalities as fast as possible to reach a period of quiet in the departure lounge before the stress of further transport and a new context. The waiting is simultaneously too long and too brief (rather like flying itself). It might involve a book or laptop, or an assessment of what fashions in perfume and shoes are doing. Regardless of who is with me, I prefer it simple and silent. It only becomes boring if extended beyond its scheduled duration, and I never spend it on the landside.

So, as I walk round Departures with my Non-Place group, I am noticing how the seats support the use of trolleys and the interests of the shops surrounding them by facing outwards in a long back-to-back line. I am noticing that they don't support collective action, but feeling no concern on my own behalf. I make an effort and start to wonder what might happen if large seat circles appeared somewhere in the airport concourse. Would people have more fun?

One of our group proposes a means of linking up lone travellers by matching attributes. I think of all the crude 'friend of friend' buddy systems on the Web and wonder how it might work. And I panic slightly at the thought that the airport might become one big networking opportunity. Then I reflect that something would be useful to sort out all those near misses at the start of the day.

We go on to look at the areas conceived to be sociable. It is evident that they all belong to concessions selling food and drink. They are busy.

There is an 'entertainment' area, or so labelled, and boasting several arcade games. The demography of the users is extreme: all five are either under 16 or over 70.

Another feature stands out: a touch-screen kiosk advertising the JobCentre's vacancy listings. We discuss the relevance of finding the JobCentre at the airport. We follow the links: there is nothing in the section devoted to social scientists. We observe the prominent placing of the link to armed forces careers.

Something about the trappings of the airport, its feeling of centralised control; its commercialism; its conservatism, is beginning to get to us... We’ve seen too much and thought too hard: we start to resist.

Could social activities be fostered that didn't involve consumption? Might they provide the focus that would make sense of connecting strangers? Plane-spotting aside, there are so many things one might do together if the means were there and one had the whim – sing, dance the tango, play chess, sign up as a volunteer for a charity, give a massage, entertain each other's kids.

Think festivals for a different environment in which thousands of people flow. Then think about the differences and think again. Could spontaneous social or collective behaviour be allowed to develop in this space of prescribed routines and fear management?

Even if spaces were provided for social activities, wouldn't they just fill with backpackers seeking a quiet place to sleep? Could a bulletin board or local area network be tolerated by the authorities without intolerable security measures for users? After all, such a network could also foster other, less desirable, forms of collective action. I suddenly dream of overlaying this ordinary Stansted day with a VR simulation of an airport crisis that only the players know is happening. A non-event, perhaps?

We return to the bunker and compare notes. We spend some time considering the affordances of a smooth flat floor and how this shapes the experience of using Stansted.

Then yet another theme surfaces, though it comes a little late to receive much attention: the meeting of local and global. How does an airport fit into its two contexts: a small part of the English county of Essex and a network of transport and communication hubs? The airport as a resource for and a major employer of local people – how is this reflected? Again the idea conjures images in my head: a farmers' market in the extension, offering entrepreneurial space to the producers of the area and a reason for local shoppers to visit; giving the lie to foreign visitors that British food only comes processed; building on the transition marked by moving from the High Street shops of the landside to the global fashions of the departure lounge.

And looking at the experience of each traveller, the same process is played out in small. We cannot travel without a concept of home - I think back to our marathon runner with the dyed hair. People make a transition as they move through an airport and each person's transition will involve a balance of desires for 'own' and 'other'. So what best presents the thrilling tension between home and away? Would the balance be different at different times of day or year, depending on the ratio of business to pleasure travellers?

Our thoughts – some of them - are captured in notes on a screen projected on the wall and gradually we go from reporting back, through discussion, to an attempt to extract the research topics that are the cluster's intended output. And then it's nearly over. Time has flown.

We part about 5pm, most people to check in. I leave to join a small group of users that we've given little thought to – people waiting to meet a flight with creeping delay. My cousin just happens to be flying into Stansted on the evening of Thursday 14th April, expected 8pm, now due 21.00... 21.18... 21.25. Normally I wouldn't come to the airport to meet her. But here I am, waiting. Suddenly I am no longer a privileged researcher, just someone standing unhappily by the Arrivals board.

In the meantime, since I am there, I watch El Al arrive ahead of its flight, with its flanking of armed police, and its extra barriers and queuing mechanisms. It happens that Thursday night brings with it one of the three flights we have been told about. Social software suddenly seems a long way off.

I imagine one more device as I'm standing there, another piece of intelligence that could be abused. It's a tracking system that reports to my mobile. It monitors my cousin's progress by informing me of the position of her luggage. It would give me some real idea of her passage through the air, and then airside. Not so much social, as socially enabling: guarantee that I could be in the right place at the right time with a smile.

But, by then, like most of the people at airports, I really want to be somewhere else.

I see home about midnight: it's been an interesting day.

Associated Link: Stansted Airport map

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