User Experience of Place

Once upon a time, I thought I was done with web things, and wanted to break out of two dimensions. So I went to landscape architecture school to learn how to design public spaces. I spent an intense three years immersed in landscape analysis, theory, history, ecology, planning, and design. The program encompassed landscape at a range of scales — garden, street, park, city, region, watershed, ecosystem.

Many days were spent learning how to identify native plants. Many nights were spent hovering over layers of tracing paper. As it turned out, what I enjoyed most about landscape architecture wasn’t the plants or the studios. I loved exploring the user experience of place — how places evoke emotions, how they encourage or discourage behaviors, and what makes them succeed or fail at their intended purpose.

Landscape studies

My favorite learning activities involved visiting sites and figuring out how to record and express their experiential qualities. One of my first assignments involved “emotion mapping.” I chose a small seating area outside University of Oregon’s law school.

In another class, we walked around the city of Eugene, studying the design of public amenities. We took photos and traced over them, learning how to represent texture, light, and shadow. Here, I’m observing how brick was used to provide a comfortable seating area and shape the surrounding environment.

One of my favorite book assignments was The Image of the City by urban planner and theorist Kevin Lynch. It’s about how we create mental models of the places we visit and inhabit. It describes a set of basic elements we use to visualize places in our minds and describe them to other people. In this class exercise, we visited Oregon City and figured out how to map it using Lynch’s essential elements of place.

Prior to beginning a studio project, we often conducted precedent research of masterpiece landscapes we couldn’t easily visit. Here is my precedent study poster examining the Jardin Atlantique, a park located above the Gare Montparnasse in Paris.

Experiments in a Familiar City

When it came time to choose my Master’s project, I knew it had to be about the human experience of place. But I didn’t want to just research, I needed to make something. In the end, I couldn’t resist designing a product — a deck of cards full of creative prompts for exploring and recording places.

Designing the deck involved many experiments. In my very first experiment, I picked a site and randomly drew two cards — Lingering and Glossary. (I’m using Italics to indicate the cards I was working with at the time.) Here is a page from my glossary of lingering at Pioneer Courthouse Square in Portland.

In another experiment, I explored Gather and Disperse as I walked through a long, linear street fair. I tried out a spontaneous method of Notation. It was not effective for communication purposes, but was effective in helping me to internalize the experience and later recall the highlights.

Back in the classroom, I gave Storytelling a shot. I gathered my classmates into a circle and told a three-minute story about a Native American drum circle I encountered on my walk. I used simple props for illustration — two square wooden dowels, some black beans, and some white beans. I later captured the story for posterity in the form of Storyboards.

I performed a series of experiments inspired by Jamison Square in Northwest Portland, focusing on sensations of Color, Form, Stillness and Motion. I visited the park in different Seasons and Weather. My simpler recording methods included Diagrams and a model made of paper and clay.

I then ventured into more abstract territory, creating a “visceral memento” — a kinetic Sculpture that could instantly transport me back to Jamison Square. Using basic office and craft supplies and a cheap table fan, I sought to evoke the splashing and jumping movements of the children playing in the water, and the way they ping-ponged back and forth between the center of the pool and their parents sitting on the grass. The sculpture itself didn’t look like much. But when activated by a fan, the shadows cast by the dangling chains, planes, and balls were evocative.

Back in the drawing studio, I set up my sculpture, positioned the lights, turned on the fan, and gazed at the shadows while Drawing a series of postcards in watercolor and ink.

Experiments in an Unfamiliar Town

After a series of experiments in a city I knew well, it was time to try out my deck of cards in a completely unfamiliar environment. I visited the small town of Dufur, Oregon, surrounded by wheat fields and fruit orchards.

Instead of focusing on two or three cards over a long period of time, I went through dozens of them in a few days. My recording methods were Drawing and Mapping. My wild cards were Time of Day and Transport Mode. I used 20 discover cards, including Lynch-inspired Edges, Paths, and Landmarks and sensations like Color, Light and Dark, and Surfaces. Four of the cards focused on people — where the best People Views were in Dufur, what their Activities were, what Sitting places they gravitated to, and what Traces they left behind.

Conclusion

In the end, I didn’t become a landscape architect. I didn’t really want to design a bench; I wanted to photograph people sitting on different kinds of benches. I didn’t really want to design a park; I wanted to watch people move through a park, and figure out why they were going where they were going. And instead of designing a landscape for my final project, I designed a product. In conclusion, the evidence shows that that whenever I wander away from product design, I always find my way back. But my fascination with the UX of place endures…