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Users as architects: thinking big/reading small

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conference contribution
posted on 2006-05-03, 16:05 authored by Juliet Sprake
Using the realm of the city to explore new 'ways of seeing' the urban experience raises an important issue of not only who designs the city, but how it is interpreted by those who live in it. This need not be seen as a passive relationship where architects and planners make the big decisions and are therefore central in determining how the city is used. Far from it. This paper explores ways in which users are architects in shaping the future of London. In schools, design often centres on the hand-held product and from here, its associated meanings and values. (There is little reason to focus on the large scale in the D&T orders.) This paper seeks to evidence how a specific view of architecture offers students in Design and Technology opportunities to creatively explore a 'lived-in' relationship with architectural products that differs from analysing the use of smaller scale, everyday products. Research focuses on how theories concerned with analysis of human activity can frame development of 'reading' in design education. As such, this paper reflects part of a wider research brief on language and the culture of design in secondary schools. The city is not confined to the spatial scale of the building, or indeed that of the city itself, but encompasses the whole, multiscalar landscape produced by human activity: from the corporeal to the global, the worldly to the intimate. (Borden et al, 2001)

History

School

  • Design

Research Unit

  • IDATER Archive

Pages

300692 bytes

Citation

SPRAKE, J., 2001. Users as architects: thinking big/reading small. IDATER 2001 Conference, Loughborough: Loughborough University

Publisher

© Loughborough University

Publication date

2001

Notes

This is a conference paper.

Language

  • en

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