DIAGRAMMING
at specific times throughout the day. This directly relates to the amount of social engagement, and what that social engagement consists of. Weather it be about how drunk someone had become on the weekend (this generic of conversation occurs mostly between the house of 12pm and 4p) to the highly opinionated differences being shared between parametric N.U.R.B surfaces and curves in Rhino and 3DSMax. (Between the hours of 8am to 1pm and 7pm to 1am)
I had decided very carefully when choosing a context for my dialectograms, as a place was needed that I knew in great detail and interacted with on a daily basis. It was also fundamental to capture my personal experience and my intimate knowledge of these spaces throughout the drawings in the hope of understanding and resolving various issues that they were tormented by. To do this my dialectograms needed to show the psycho-geographical landscape of which I was accustomed to, or as Mitch Miller, the inventor of the dialectogram would put it; “Mytho-geographical�. A phrase that pertains to a broad-minded and more open concept of working and from which a diagram can be produced showing surprising secrets of the shapes, stories and systems of everyday life. (Miller, 2011)
When moving away from a social context to a more mechanical view of the studio the diagrams show a striking number of ergonomic inconsistencies and aesthetic anomalies. Such as the poorly designed window-opening mechanism throughout the studio. Also the seemingly randomized layout and placement of objects that create an increasingly difficulty environment to contend with. A particular example of this is the recycling bin being permanently placed behind the door to the MArch studio, stopping the door with a loud and obnoxious thud every time a person enters the room.
I chose the architectural studios because they do just that. I have spent nearly 5 years in between these walls and until now I assumed that I knew almost everything the building had to tell me but I did not realize how wrong I could be. Upon starting these diagrams I chose to portray an atmosphere where the smallest of details that make up the everyday come out in humorous and imaginative information. Recording the unseen and ignored, the subjective and objective throughout the studio, from idle doorstops, to pure fantastical stories of the imagination.
In conclusion, the dialectogram has allowed me to collect several very different types of data and this data can be implemented into particular parts of the building in the hope of improving the studio spaces. The information from diagrams can be adopted into new strategies to ease congestion, open up and close off different spaces depending on the types and number of people in a given place at a given time. It can also give insight into the sociological fluctuations throughout daily routines and thus create academic studies such as lectures of seminars to suit the mentality of the studio at specific times of the day. Finally the diagrams also show a more poetic and self-indulgent side to the studio space. By creating narratives for the space in which we inhabit we are able to find a phenomenological connection and animate the inanimate throughout the studio. I find this connection that the students and staff share with the building becomes the central reason as to why these dialectograms succeed to describe the studios in such intimate detail.
Historically the dialectogram is a very recent method of diagrammatic recording. Invented by Miller only 4 years ago, they are not constrained to any conventional or vernacular methods that would otherwise allow other diagraming methods to stagnate. This can be seen in the vibrancy and character of life that Miller is able to represents throughout his work and it is what I intend to emulate. Although I attempt to catch the laughably bizarre human nature in the diagrams there are numerous factors portrayed throughout where a far more serious agenda can be found. One of my first discoveries was a correlation between analyzing the numbers of students and staff in the studio and the particular personalities of the people in
fig. 1: Panoramic photograph of hared studio spaces (Dialectogram No.1) fig. 2: Panoramic photograph of MArch studio space (Dialectogram No.2)
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