Leadings Lines: Design for Hidden Histories
In this project we explored the unseen and often intentionally hidden histories of the land currently occupied by Vancouver, BC. This project makes tangible parts of the historic shoreline and occupancy of current day False Creek, temporally situating those who pass by within the pre-colonized shoreline.
Fall 2017
Skills
Land-Based Research
Installation Design
UX Design
Objective
Make tangible an often unseen or hidden aspect of the history of the land we occupy. Pay special attention to the colonial history of this place and how things have changed with that
This project was done with Brittany Williams, Adan Lemus, and Ricardo Perez.
Exploration
This project started with a series of walks to become more familiar with the areas around our school. Even after a century of industrial activity there were much life on the land, surviving in spite of what had been thrown at it. From here we decided to focus the project on sites of hidden violence committed towards the land its residents.
Research
We conducted field research, defined relevant sites within our school building and explored public archives to get a grounding for our work and direction. While the project premise was initially quite broad it was quickly narrowed down to a focus on water, which sustains us.
Iteration
We explored a number of experiences users might have with our design before settling on a projection installation on windows within the school. Tests of alternate formats proved to be too complicated and placed too heavy a cognitive load on the viewer.
Early directions involving mapping the tide as it would have come in over historic mud flats and projecting real time tides washing over windows and walls within the school building. Testing showed this to be a bit too passive for the impact we endeavoured to.
A shift to visualizing the historic fauna of the area came about as it proved to be more enticing to interaction and elicited more of an emotional connection from users. We also brought in and hacked an Xbox Kinect sensor to map users into the installation, situating them in the environment we created.
Analysis
Research revealed that the new Emily Carr campus is constructed on the historic shoreline of false creek before it was filled in to enable heavy industry in the area. Because of the newness to the space and ongoing decolonizing efforts at our school, we chose to visualize the space pre-settlement to situate users in a history buried in our region.
Outcomes
Our final design visualized a dense school of salmon, a fish with great importance and recognition in our region, on internally-facing windows of our interaction design lab space. A distinct fish followed users movements in front of the space, situating them in the space we currently occupy. A soundscape plays concurrently, linking to multiple sensory touch points and delivering a brief experience of a world so different from that which we currently occupy.
Watch a video prototype below.