Beginning ISFS

For the past week or so, we’ve been working on Instruction Sets for Strangers. A lot of this project has been, so far, in my comfort zone - as an architecture student, I studied public spaces and how to design interventions for them, and after graduating, I worked in an urban design firm. In my undergraduate dissertation, I explored how people interact in public spaces.

How do you catch strangers’ attention, and keep it? How do different people interact differently with public space? What makes a public space successful? These are questions I’m used to asking. However, something I have found challenging is taking a step back, trying to just observe strangers instead of trying to solve a ‘problem’ like I would do as an architect; creating an interactive installation and letting it be for people to interact with without direction does not come very naturally to me right now.

A common question I would ask while designing something for people as an architect is ‘How does this enhance their quality of life?’ Generally speaking, anything that did not enhance quality of life in some small way, shape, or form was not worth doing. I kept coming back to this as my partner and I explored the idea of temptation and how people would give in to it, or how people would interact with objects on the ground. There’s nothing that possibly affects people’s quality of life if they see a balloon that can be popped and wonder whether or not to pop it; the whole experiment would probably end up being more of an exploration of human psychology than an urban design intervention that affects people’s lives. I keep having to break myself out of the system I’ve ascribed to for the past eight years; and it’s engaging and frustrating in equal parts. 

It’s an interesting dichotomy for me; because some parts of this project are extremely familiar to me, while other parts are the antithesis of my thought process. In either case, I’m excited to see where it leads me.