Émilie's comments

Critics – ARPL3003

General comments – Émilie

Presentation

When a presentation is limited in time, students really need to prepare and practice, otherwise it shows immediately. A lot of students couldn’t finish, and in some case we couldn’t even get to the main idea of the presentation.

In most of the cases, there were too many pictures or images in each slide, which I find distracting. Also, students should be careful with small images and small fonts –it was sometimes very difficult to read, even from the 1st row. Is it always good to make a test before the presentation, even if it’s only with 1 or 2 slides.

Student should think about the right type of drawing for the idea they want to share. For example, sections are very useful (and were underused) to understand relations between different spaces, proportions, etc.

Students could think of visual “tools” that would help the audience to situate the places/spaces mentioned in the presentation, especially when time is limited (a small plan of the journey indicating the specific place described, in the corner of the slide, for example).

Simple pictures (or photoshoped versions with a simple “drawing” filter) are useful for descriptions or to support an analysis – but in my opinion they can’t be used as the main visual tool to present an analysis. Drawings made over a picture and other drawings or diagrams are usually more effective: they help to highlight a specific aspect or idea about the place/space mentioned.

I think that this project requires students to work at a smaller scale than they might be used to, i.e. the scale of a person / a pedestrian. For example, if someone talks about building façades that make it uninviting or intimidating for a pedestrian, I would expect to see drawings that show a certain level of details; the changing surfaces of buildings, their materiality, etc.

Besides drawing, drawing and drawing, another advice I would give to students who want to improve the graphic quality of their presentation is to spend some time observing and analysing projects (mostly in urban design or architecture) that they find interesting or well presented. How did the designer use drawings to express his ideas: use of color for specific elements, transparency for others, lines, diagrams, etc…

Content

I was hoping for more critical observations on the principles that students have learned in school, in comparison to the reality they have observed in their journey. Are the width of the sidewalks and the presence of trees always (the most relevant) elements to explain the absence of pedestrians in the city? Is the presence of a new bus/BRT stop will automatically improve mobility opportunities for everyone? How is it that some things that seem to go against the principles you’ve learned in school (public taxis for example, narrow sidewalks, informal markets or street stands) are actually working (even if not perfectly) and are used by a lot of people? Should we change that completely?

It was very interesting when students could identify through their journey existing elements that can contribute to improve the public life and use of public space, things that they will be able to build on in the next phase of their project. I appreciate this empirical, positive, and above all, less normative, approach to planning and design.

The best works were in my opinion the ones starting with a clear argument / message and the presentation of different observations or “elements of proof” to support it. No need to present every aspects of a journey – better to concentrate on the ones that are truly relevant and useful for the main argument.

When I said in class that I didn’t learn much about some of the journey presented, this is what I meant. Most places were described in a very conventional or detached way. The elements identified and presented were the obvious ones (what I called the “recipe” for good planning: sidewalks, trees, benches, etc…) but had no relation with the main idea / argument presented, which was, in contrast, the students’ own way of looking at and understanding a place. Obviously, this does not mean that sidewalks and benches should not be considered and integrated in the next phase of the project, but at this stage, I expected that students would go further and explore a more personal and original angle of their space and of the city, with the corresponding observations and drawings to support it. We had some nice example of these angles with presentations on public arts, layers of the city, time, and boundaries…

For the rest of the project, I would suggest that students pay more attention to this adequacy between the main argument / theme they are working on and the material they have collected to do so. And I think that a theme should not be “forced” on a specific journey/ space if the pictures, drawings and observations collected don’t speak of it at all (for example, so far, no one working on the gender aspect of a place really managed to present material speaking of the particular experience of a women). Students could either go back to the site and collect new, more relevant, material or go back to what they have already collected and to try to see if they can draw something else from it.