Field Guide to Social Spaces, 2019
M.Arch Studio
These videos study the movement of bodies through an urban context in hopes to catalog a variety of social-spatial conditions. Filmed on a major down-town street of Chicago, a tracking and measuring of direction and proximity is conducted.
This is preliminary research that I hope to pursue further in the vein of measuring and graphing social interactions on a large scale in order to better understand how people act and interact.
Several specific elements and conditions are identified that each lend themselves to a different kind of space: the individual, the group (unintentional), the pair (intentional). These different players, in combination with unspoken social rules like “walk on the right side,” and “if you don’t know where you’re going, get out of the way,” create innumerable subtle shifts in spaces occur every second.
These shifts happen quickly, are never discussed, yet people navigate them with relative ease. What design insights can be extrapolated from this kind of study?
This project is one major component of this thesis. They can be found linked below:
1. Social research, based on the busy sidewalks of downtown Chicago
2. A Field Guide to Social Spaces, which aims to capture the intricacies of human interaction, in comparison with our built environments.
3. A live performance that embodied and activated the basic forms of social space, as outlined by the Field Guide.
Others in M.Arch Thesis
