Monday, March 31, 2008

ID-place| Amman | project summery

In a course I'm giving for design students at JU I am using a theme related to identity. Students are designing projects using software that they are learning in the course. The issue of identity is tackled through identifying an entity each time. The entity they worked with in this project was place; city.
As a starter I took a walk with them around some of the older parts of Amman. Later they were given a description of the project
[[ [Questions of `who we are’ are often intimately related to questions of `where we are ’, an idea captured in the environmental psychological concept of place-identity.]*

The entity you are going to deal with now is “Place; city” through which a new aspect of your identity will be defined.

You have to model two entities; The physical environment around you and YOU.

You should try to be creative in the way you’ll perceive and portray the two models and their interaction with one another.

These are inspirational notions for you to consider and think about:

Forces of tension, suspension and interaction.
Feelings of hope, fascinations, pride, apathy, confusion, shame.

[The importance of place for creating and sustaining a sense of self]*
[…a `minimalist’ (Stokols, 1990) conception of the `placing’ of self and society: the conception that places are fixed, empty and undialectical backgrounds to, or containers of, social action. Places are re-conceived as dynamic arenas that are both socially constituted and constitutive of the social.]*


* Displacing place-identity: A discursive approach to locating self and other, John Dixon, Lancaster University, UK

]]

Yesterday they handed their projects which turned out to be quite interesting. Here they are...

Order in Chaos | Diran Mlanjlian
[The city holds me
The city fulfills me
The city completes me
I am with no balance without the city
The city holds me
The city centers me
The city holds my chaos
The city is perfectly chaotic]


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A mystification like mine | Sama Saba
[Amman and I share the same confusion...
in a city full of contradictions i struggle to build myself and search for my identity .Keeping up with the contemporary urbanization yet maintaining the bond with my traditional society.
The bridge that is supposed to link those two regions is wrecked incapable of achieving its purpose.]



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Amman | Dina Khayyat
[Who are we? Each of us are our own person.
Where we are? We are in a city that was once something but now its another,
but will never change its essence like each and every person living in Amman.
As for me. The old part of Amman represents my culture , traditions, behavior and the esence of my soul where as the new parts of Amman represents the way I change and developed and grew to make the best out of what I am.]



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The City of Ongoing Vagueness | Hala Abu-Mizar
[THE CITY: as for the environment around me, it’s in nonstop motion. Through its way, there are obstacles, some are obvious, and some are hidden. The diversity of the shapes and forms represents those barriers as I see it. ME: revolving around the city is my way to enter, as I try to control each aspect of me, still I can’t be apart from the city I belong to. My aim is to stand out on different intensities. The base is to be solid. At the same time there is flexibility. Colors theme: I am attached to the colors around me, which is reflected in the way I see MYSELF in MY CITY. As for the sketchy ground I see my self reliving my childhood in every street and every place that touched me and was apart of my identity. The continuity of me and the city both vertically and horizontally indicates the growing of both of us in the paths that we consciously and unconsciously choose.]



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5AzEEEn | Hanada Khatayibeh
[The experience of losing the soul of the place and wonder whether to live the imagination or the reality, and finally believe that you can’t take one and leave the other so you decide to live with them both..]



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Cellular Utopia | Ala Tabba'a
[The Future is unpredictable. The power of foresight resides in the beautiful game of makebelieve.
Connecting inner peace and where we belong is the closest we’ll ever get to Utopia
The beauty of the human body resides in the power of cells; they interact and react, a wonderful mechanism no machine can ever duplicate.]



2 comments:

Sandra said...

very interesting exercise

Anonymous said...

i like this very much, its inspiring! Although the results are different, somehow all the projects are similar, or talk about the same thing. I wonder how students from a village in Jordan or a smaller European city would give expression to this issue.