Reading Reflections

The Social Life of Urban Spaces

Hi everyone, so today I’m going to be reviewing an excerpt from the book “The Social Life of Urban Spaces” by William Whyte. Whyte starts off by talking a little bit about public city spaces & why some work to serve the people using them & why some spaces designed do not function as they were intended to for various reasons. He brings up the group he called “The Street Life Project” which he founded in the early 1970s. This organization started off studying New York City parks & playgrounds. They focused on the subject why some parks were crowded for recreational use & why some were not. They looked at why kids in East Harlem at the time preferred playing in the streets in comparison to a local playground. They noticed additional factors such as concerned mothers & family member’s ability to watch their kids all the while staying close to their home overlooking the kids playing from a stoop. It seems that convenience had a bit of a role to play here. In continuation of their study the next focus was on the mid town Manhattan area & the observation of key choke points where overcrowding took place. They next looked at office building plazas & the convenience they played for the people occupying these spaces for leisure at lunch time for chatting & sunbathing on a sunny day. Plazas like the one observed at 77 water street were highly successful in serving the public but most office plazas built as public spaces did not. The city offering contractors & builders millions of dollars incentives to build these public spaces begin to demand a better use of their money for these plazas & wanted to instill new guidelines for better plazas to be built. As it turns out, in the interviews following the observations of the people going through the space, that office workers occupying the buildings just wanted to put as much space between their bosses & themselves during their free time. After several presentations of their findings were presented to architects, local groups & city planners, eventually new zoning rules were implemented for the construction of urban plazas to better serve the cities they were built for.


Cultural Probes

Recently I was reading an article called “Cultural Probes from Interactions magazine” by Bill Gaver, Tony Dunne, & Elena Pacenti. The article starts off discussing how designing for pleasure can be different then designing for utility & reflecting upon how difficult it can be for researchers to use probes into a scientific approach. The examiners observed in research probing into peoples lives asking certain questions, that it was the hope the results would bring ideas for innovative designs that are useful to people. Unfortunately the questions had their limits, causing the creation of another more playful & game oriented technique to gather information from people. The new probes were found to be interesting, abstract, left open to interpretation & somewhat informative to the design groups leading the studies. They used a disposable camera repacked with requests for a specific list of things in their lives, a dream recorder with a 10 sec limit for reflection & a family & friends map based on Dante’s Heaven & Hell map interpreted by the subject for use. I don’t know why or even if it is right for me to say but on a personal note, I found this article used a lot of dull & un-engaging language to get it’s point across. I liked the idea of probing as a research tool & the methodology used here but found the article a bit hard to follow at times & caught myself almost falling asleep reading it