AB ROGERS DESIGN Brief for student workshop 26.08.11
brief
We need to reinvent the high street as a place where cultural experiences can be found, a place of sensory, aesthetic and intellectual stimulation and discovery. The most visited museum in the world is the Louvre in Paris and last year it received 8.5 million visitors where the Mall of America received 40 million plus. The shopping mall and the high street have become destinations for major social occasions, places where families and friends happily pass the time and spend the day. We need to challenge and change this scenario, to look at how we can make shopping more interesting, more culturally thought provoking.
BRIEF
How can we distract shoppers and get them thinking and experiencing things outside and beyond their normal expectations? We need to bring generosity to the high street. To introduce into hitherto fearsomely commercial spaces a feeling nurturing, altruism and philanthropy with no hidden agenda. Sophie Calle carried out a fascinating project in New York where she inhabited a telephone booth, furnished it and then invited people in, offering them drinks and cigarettes. She then observed their responses to her extraordinary actions, actions that stemmed from a generosity seldom seen in that context.
BRIEF
Objects placed outside in the public domain will always be occupied, interacted and played with, altering the landscape and how people behave within it. There have been numerous experiments to observe this phenomenon – the big wheel in Hep 5 in the Umeda commercial district of Osaka or the VW experiment where sounds was added to stairs to get people walking upstairs rather than using the escalators. In Melbourne we placed a series of interactive blobs on Finders Lane outside Federation Square and felt proud to watch people stop and interact with them.
BRIEF
In the Westfield Shopping Centre at White City in London we have worked on a series of pavilions or kiosks that contain retail on the inside and interactives for the public on the outside. The walls become seats, the roof a mini garden and a slide brings you back down to earth. When we work on exhibitions and museums we always incorporate soft piazza’s which act as places to sit and to escape to and these spaces are always well used and their inherent generosity appreciated.
If you put a seat in the street people will sit on it and more than that they will contemplate, communicate and discover.
BRIEF
task I want you to think about street furniture and how it can change the space it is in and the behaviour of people around it, as well as how it can be subverted to make people think and used to create an escape – an oasis from the everyday life of the high street.
Your task is to create a temporary intervention that can be taken out to the high street and experimented with. The intervention must challenge, change and subvert the shoppers experience whether it is a seat, a slide, a portable garden, a talking umbrella, a tent or a giant mushroom. It could be a person, you, performing, talking, interacting with shoppers. But your intervention must communicate with the public and make them think outside the box. TASK
We will run an all day workshop in a secret retail location – a mall or a high street – taking your experiment out to the commercial world, working the intervention objects and performances and getting shoppers to interact with them to observe their affect. Your work should aim to challenge the norm and what we take for granted and to find a new way to bring a new type of cutural experience to the high street.
TASK
inspiration
URBAN interventions
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outdoor interventions
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HIGH STREET INTERVENTIONS
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dotTY CONTAMINATION
inspiration
ab rogers design 22 Parkside Wimbledon London SW19 5NA
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