SJSU+SNU Workshop:
Building 49 Human-Made Field Guide

Traditionally, field guides are tools designed to help people understand their environments: the plants, animals, land formations, and other natural occurrences specific to an area. Designed to be brought into the “field” they are meant to help identify objects in and describe the local environment. Often field guides are used to distinguish animals, plants, and geologic formations, that may be similar in appearance, but are fundamentally different one and another. While traditional field guides still serve a practical purpose, a guide to navigate society today would look much different.

Prompt

Consider a field guide for the human-made objects in and around Building 49 at Seoul National University. Our relationship with nature has largely been displaced by interactions with cities and electronics. While it once was of concern to distinguish between edible and poisonous mushrooms, nowadays we’re much more likely to be discerning around the converging forms of storefronts and architecture, smart-phone look-a-likes, or similarity in clothing designs.

If we look more closely at the technologies we use and expand our search to the digital world, we see new forms of evolution and derivation in artificial intelligence and software. What are the proprietary algorithms that sort our various newsfeeds? The stickers that each messaging apps use? The emoji native to each operating system? How has our culture and technology evolved to produce seemingly similar forms and what are their differences?

In this quick group workshop, you will examine and organize your environments (digital, physical, and in-between), possessions, and/or behavior, to create a field guide to describe the Design Department at SNU – exploring its building and immediate surroundings as a site. Keep in mind this is a quick, social, workshop, so the outcomes will be rough, playful, and likely in-progress. Try to have fun, and embrace intuition and spontaneity!

Consider in particular our transcontinental collaboration, and how this meeting and workshop, can be a motivation for your field guide. What are the differences between the most popular messenger apps used in Seoul, and those used in San Jose? What are the similarities? What may seem novel to a visitor from California, but everyday to an inhabitant of Seoul? What does the last played song on our phones say about us and our cultural contexts? What do the contents of our bags reveal about our cultural backgrounds, and how can they become a guide for others visiting Seoul/SNU?

Topics

Deliverables

20 specimens, organized in a meaningful way
Place your organized specimens in the provided Figma file along with a written description of your method and why you used it.

Resources

Step 1

In your assigned groups, you will begin by identifying and documenting a collection. Explore your surroundings (building 49 and the nearby), and your digital world (smartphone and computer), using photographs and screenshots to collect the following:

Look for the structures, graphics, and spatial relationships that organize the building and give it a unique visual character (signage, architectural details, etc.). You can review the entire building, a single room within a building, the nature outside, the surrounding cafes, and so on.

We must be able to reach your site within a 5 minute walk.

Step 2

For each of your collections, experiment with 3 organizational approaches from the LATCH method (try at least 3 different sketches per collection). Document each method with your camera or on the computer. After completion, assess the best organizational system for your each of your content types.

Step 3

Using the provided Figma template, document your collection arranging your imagery with your preferred organizational method and a 100 word description of your point of view. The result of the workshop will be a presentation of the organizational systems and assessment.

Schedule

LATCH by Richard Saul Wurman

Location

Location is chosen when the information who you are comparing comes from several different sources or locales. Doctors use different locations of the body to group and study medicine. Concerning an industry you might want to know where on the world goods are distributed.

Alphabet

Alphabet is best used when you have enormous amount of data. For example words in a dictionary or names in a telephone. As usually everybody is familiar with the Alphabet, categorizing by Alphabet is recommendable when not all the audience is familiar with di erent kind of groupings or categories you could use instead.

Time

Time is the best form of categorization for events that happen over xed durations. Meeting schedules or our calendar are examples. The work of important persons might be displayed as timeline as well. Time is an easily framework in which changes can be observed and comparisons made.

Category

Category is an organization type often used for goods and industries. Shops and services in the yellow pages are easy to find by category. Retail stores are divided into e.g. men-and woman-clothing. This mode works well to organizing items of similar importance.

Hieararchy

Hierarchy organizes by magnitude. From small to large, least expensive to most expensive, by order of importance, etc. Hierarchy is to be used if you want to assign weight or value to the ordered information.

References

Credits

Adapted from a project by Jon Sueda.

The Internet Cache Portrait series is composed of uncensored streams of images passively collected through a sitter's daily Internet browsing. The series depicts individual sitters from different countries, occupations and genders, all rendered during the same two week period of time. Faces of 'friends' from the sitter's social profile exist side by side with corporate logos, mangled pieces of google maps, family photos and banner advertisements. These algorithmically produced prints act as a contemporary nude, exposing in a generous and open way an individual's private online interactions.
All Possible Chairs is a profile of a Monobloc chair. The Monobloc chair is the most common plastic chair that is manufactured from one piece of plastic in a single process. Every 70 seconds on earth, a single chair is produced and sold for around three dollars. As this chair is so quick and cheap to make, thousands of different models have been produced. All Possible Chairs is an attempt to represent Monobloc chair as a comprehensible object that embraces the variety of iterations and its speedy proliferation.
I didn’t make one hundred chairs just for myself or even in an effort to rescue a few hundred unwanted chairs from the streets. The motivation was the methodology: the process of making, of producing and absolutely not striving for the perfect one. This kind of making was very much about restrictions rather than freedom. The restrictions were key: the material, the style or the design of the found chairs and the time available — just a 100 days. Each new chair had to be unique, that’s what kept me working toward the elusive one-hundredth chair.