Design, Strategy, & Practice Week 9: A/D/O Visit Reflection

I had mixed feelings about the project developed by the AA students. On the positive side, the documentation was excellent for a one-week project - from the leaflet, the exhibition design, the process documentation, to the “performance” of navigating the city, everything had an impressive amount of detail and care attached to it. What is more, the vehicle design communicated well the concept of creating an “collage” or “index” of the area by bringing together disparate materials and tools from it.

On the negatives - nowhere in the documentation were there any words coming from the community that this project claimed to engage with. The students themselves admitted that people were content to look at their vehicle rather than interact with them. Empathic listening is a much harder task to accomplish than absurdist performance, and it requires more than just using the community’s resources or doing workshops. Anyone can get people’s attention on the street; to claim that this constitutes engagement is akin to claiming that a article with a clickbait title meaningfully engages with its readers on the basis of them clicking on it.