Going Beyond the Plan: The Bandwidth That Is Stephen Willats [Research and Debate: Art as Social Practice]

Going Beyond the Plan: The Bandwidth That Is Stephen Willats Marcia McNally For more than forty years Stephan Willats has been going “beyond the plan” as a way to consider and then counteract plans that have been made for him and society. Reacting to the social visions manifest in the postwar housing estates of the London suburbs, he set out to develop a “meta lan- guage” in which he and residents could communicate with each other about their everyday environment. Beginning with a piece called “Man from the Twentyfirst Century” and continuing today, Willats has carefully examined how people adapt the repetitive and alienating dwelling units that characterize public housing from this era. Through photography, discussion, and sometimes even field adven- ture he has chronicled these personal landscapes, both interior and out-of-doors. If that project sounds familiar, you are right. His meth- odology is uncannily reminiscent of Kevin Lynch, Clare Cooper Marcus, and Lawrence Halprin — pioneers in the fields of social factors and experience-based participa- tory design. However, I asked Willats if he knew of these people; and I asked Cooper Marcus, a fellow Brit, if she knew of Willats’s work. The answer from both was no. Willats’s premise is that the artist can operate within the fabric of the community and does not have to be bound by a gallery. Starting in the 1960s he began to experiment with cybernetics and various learning theories in order to “transcend restricted language codes . . . to demonstrate a practice of art that would be meaningful to people outside that world.” To accomplish this, he employed various participatory approaches, a primary device being what he calls “the question.” “Make a map of your neighborhood showing how it relates to existing social facilities, such as shops, libraries, schools, sports clubs, etc. . . . How would you reorganize the above map in order to make the social facilities serve what you consider your neighborhood needs to be. . . . Describe and draw a map,” he asks of his partici- pants. They write essays in response; there is a dialogue between the artist and the participant; a series of photos are taken that characterize key ideas to be represented; and a poster-like or collage-like work is produced and displayed. In the recent project chronicled here Willats had resi- dents pair up and walk through the neighborhood on a predetermined route and record what they perceived. The pairs of participants then worked together to prepare a display to represent a “meeting of minds” on what is out there. The late Kevin Lynch, a professor of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT for thirty years, developed similar methods. His interest was in legibility and wayfinding — he wanted to know what districts, patterns and landmarks contributed to a citizen’s recognition and image of the city. Lynch argued that a positive image of everyday place con- tributed to emotional well-being. In the world of community planning, designers use these kinds of activities as a starting point for making change. Participatory projects in Japan, for example, often start with “town watching.” In the Kano neighborhood of Gifu, an old and rundown area, planner Jeremy Liu knew that he had to reconnect residents with their pride in place before he could start a discussion about change. To do this he had them walk the neighborhood and then create a iconographic postcard of it. In the Misyuku neighborhood of Setagaya, Yoshiharu Asanoumi used a similar device, giving citizens red picture frames to hang on places they considered to be landscape treasures. The Kano adoles- cent girl makes a postcard of herself on a swing, reading a book in front of a landmark castle. An old man in Misyuku frames a tree limb emerging out of a stone wall. My partner Randy Hester and I have developed numer- ous participatory design techniques that involve posing a question about place attachment and giving the participant a camera with which to photograph these valued places. This process was developed borrowing heavily from Ken Craik and the environmental psychologists here at Uni- versity of California, Berkeley — as well as from Lynch. For the Chesapeake Bay/EPA (Environmental Protec- tion Agency) program, we used this technique as the basis for training staff to work with communities to identify the local sacred structure. Photographing and mapping these places formed the basis for land use decision-making within sub-watersheds of the Bay drainage. We also use a step-by-step process in our design work that involves a phase of “introducing the community to itself.” After a period of intense investigation (which typically involves interviews, site analysis, and a review of existing documents and data), we formally present to participants what we have learned about the place in question. This is transactive communication — it means we have listened. It also means we have an opinion about what we’ve heard, or more to the point, we think there are certain things that need to be exhibited and discussed before we can move forward on design thinking. Willats’s use of photographic essay as “bandwidth” for language is a similar step in the meta dialogue. He develops a neighborhood language that includes icons of place that are so recognizable they transmit a code embedded in the representation of these landscapes. In a sense his art pieces say “I am speaking to you using your unique spatial language. Respond.” One of the striking things about Willats is his deep knowledge of the lives of his participants. I asked if he kept in touch with them or if he followed up to see if their McNally / Going Beyond the Plan: The Bandwidth That Is Stephen Willats