This contribution is drawn from a long-running elective at Manchester School of Architecture named 'Graphic Anthropology'. During the pandemic, the focus shifted from public space and its social lives towards the domestic sphere, challenging participants to document the spaces of everyday life.
Paper long abstract:
Anthropology has been a part of the curriculum at Manchester School of Architecture for some time, forming the school's reputation for architectural humanities grounded in the social sciences. One of the longest running units has had several names over 12 years, and was redesigned in 2020 as the 'Anthropology of Home'. This simple premise offered the opportunity to investigate the spaces where we spent so many hours during Covid-19 lockdowns and the shift to online teaching.
For this contribution, I will introduce some of the supporting tasks, or 'field notes' used to frame descriptive essays. These tasks combined practices of graphic description with theoretical richness; always with a focus on the banal and everyday. Describing the process of making a meal, the arrangement of a desk, or meaningful collections of objects made for fascinating and varied portraits of domesticity.
The importance of this for architectural education is clear: design processes often begin from assumptions about lifestyles and how spaces are used. The realities of a residential space are often substantially different to this imagined domesticity, often eliding the messiness and overlapping interests at work in making a home, be they house-mates, landlords, or neighbours. By revealing the students' own idiosyncrasies as both significant and pertinent to the design process, a new design process can be imagined, one which accommodates the actual needs and uses of the most important spaces: the home.
The graphic focus of the field notes is also important for anthropology, with a number of recent moves towards 'graphic anthropology' focusing on narrative forms such as the graphic novel, there are a wide range of other inscriptive practices relevant to the study of anthropology. By immersing ourselves in these ways of knowing, alternative processes of understanding are available to anthropologists as well as architects.
This session will recruit you as a participant, presenting you with one of the tasks undertaken by students, followed by reflections on descriptive understanding through inscriptive practices such as drawing, notation and mapping.
Accepted Contribution:
Contribution description:
Paper long abstract:
Anthropology has been a part of the curriculum at Manchester School of Architecture for some time, forming the school's reputation for architectural humanities grounded in the social sciences. One of the longest running units has had several names over 12 years, and was redesigned in 2020 as the 'Anthropology of Home'. This simple premise offered the opportunity to investigate the spaces where we spent so many hours during Covid-19 lockdowns and the shift to online teaching.
For this contribution, I will introduce some of the supporting tasks, or 'field notes' used to frame descriptive essays. These tasks combined practices of graphic description with theoretical richness; always with a focus on the banal and everyday. Describing the process of making a meal, the arrangement of a desk, or meaningful collections of objects made for fascinating and varied portraits of domesticity.
The importance of this for architectural education is clear: design processes often begin from assumptions about lifestyles and how spaces are used. The realities of a residential space are often substantially different to this imagined domesticity, often eliding the messiness and overlapping interests at work in making a home, be they house-mates, landlords, or neighbours. By revealing the students' own idiosyncrasies as both significant and pertinent to the design process, a new design process can be imagined, one which accommodates the actual needs and uses of the most important spaces: the home.
The graphic focus of the field notes is also important for anthropology, with a number of recent moves towards 'graphic anthropology' focusing on narrative forms such as the graphic novel, there are a wide range of other inscriptive practices relevant to the study of anthropology. By immersing ourselves in these ways of knowing, alternative processes of understanding are available to anthropologists as well as architects.
This session will recruit you as a participant, presenting you with one of the tasks undertaken by students, followed by reflections on descriptive understanding through inscriptive practices such as drawing, notation and mapping.
Anthropology as education
Session 1