Connect to Connect

Hi Eleanor,

Your project is very well researched and very relevant to me personally, as I am travelling in Hong Kong and China right now as I evaluate your work! I very much appreciate the framework you have presented for your project, and the spheres of sustainability you are engaging in. The analysis of issues and your approaches to addressing them are very well thought out. The brief you have set for yourself is well constructued and in itself very challenging.

I am unfortunately not as wholly convinced by your response. The aim of the project has some very good ideas, but I don't feel they are resolved by the website design you are proposing. You state that the images and memories shared will be different, and more consciously created and shared, but I'm not really seeing how this will be the case. Why will users of the website take more time to understand these things? How and why will locals contribute to the site? What specific behaviours are you looking to change, and how will this effect all the areas of sustainability you mention? How does the information design address these issues?

I do very much like the idea of the network being localised, so you can only see what is around you. This is a core idea that could be pushed much further. It makes me think of mesh networks and localised social networks, and how these are used in both activist contexts and to establish a sense of place and belonging.

I feel your research and your project are a great starting point to address the ethics of travel. It is a very important issue, and one that fits perfectly into the theme of Pleasure of this year's Memefest. Best of luck, and I look forward to seeing these ideas developed further!

Your project proposal is well written and insightful regarding your analysis of the lit review. It is also strategically well thought through in it's approach.

The mapping strategy is also a useful approach, where you are creating a very different ordering through thematic mapping based on particular senses.

There are also some interesting sources for looking further into mapping and a kind of alternative cartography that can trigger very different ways of perceiving an environment. It might be useful to research further these ideas and departure points especially some of the work and writings of Denis Wood (especially a short piece he wrote entitled "Everything sings").

Additionally the general subject of perceiving landscape in the discipline of landscape architecture, especially as a kind of of narrative for a 'user' or participant might really open up ideas for developing the thematic memory based ideas further. It has great potential in re your aims and goals.

Users can search for the types of senses taken pleasure in...

I feel a wave of science fiction in this project, and that's a good thing. There have been previous curated exhibitions that have addressed "The Sense of the City" and "Scent of the City" - both of which attempted to reboot our orientation to the city as more than just a visual experience primarily about movement and momentary consumption. My home city of Toronto has regularly exposed the specific and unique smells the city generates during each season, not that they are all pleasurable, but they are all, by their very existence, part of the city itself. So, as a project, focusing users/subjects on the experience of pleasure, not on specific tourist destinations is in its own way, a form of rewiring our expectations and our sense of anticipation.
The attention given to looking/visualizing this project as a matter of intensity and frequency makes ultimate sense. Our senses are not wired to be on/off, they are always a matter of degree allowing us to slightly experience a place, or to be totally overwhelmed, engaged, enthralled, or repulsed, revolted.
A park project in Toronto called Murmur might be worth looking at, as it ties geolocation to specific auditory experiences - this project reaches past that work, but the idea that we leave digital traces for others to find is a strong gesture towards making the invisible, sensible, able to be experienced by more subjects beyond the originating author. That back and forth between the pleasure of production (making and entry), and consumption (reading/experiencing an entry) is well delineated and described both in the text and the visual interface. The potential for cross-cultural learning here is of great interest, as its might reveal how pleasure is constituted in different languages, visualizations and overlapping experiences.
The one aspect of this that feels a bit out of place is the poster(s) - is there another way to occupy space in this sense...I totally understand that you want people to opt-in to this project/app/service...but I wonder about the initial hook...nothing comes to mind...but if such a project were to be launched I'd be curious to propose a means of starting the conversation that wasn't so...fixed to a location and one particular sense - the visual.