Designing a Public-Private space

GO BACK TO THE PAST

Our main objective for this project was finding the private places in public places with tools from the past.

So we decided to find people located in their mats at Hangang and take polaroid pictures of them.

Target destination: Han River (Hangang- 한강): The Han River is a major river found in South Korea and it is the fourth longest river on the Korean peninsula. Currently the lower parts of Hangang, which crosses through Seoul, the capital of Korea, are lined with pedestrian walkways, bicycle paths, public parks and restaurants. According to a survey conducted by Seoul Development Institute in 2011, 

Hangang is the second most scenic location in the city, after Mount Namsan.

We wanted the public place of our project to be a “hot spot” in the city of Seoul. We considered Hangang to be the few places where both public and private places coexist together. Despite it is a very well-known public place where everyone can have easy access to, many private places are present within the public place. 

Many people tend to go to Hangang to do picnics laying mats or building tents on the park 

and we considered them as private places.

PROJECT- Saturday 18th April 2015

11.00am- We started our journey at Nakseongdae (낙성대)

Our mission was to get to our final destination, Hangang, by subway without getting the help of any electronic devices. We had to find our way just by asking help from people. We asked people who helped us find the way to take pictures of us for evidence. During our 1hour journey we realized that it was quite uncomfortable to communicate with strangers and very hard to not use our smart phones. It was shocking how much we have been relying on our phones and if we had nothing to do our hand naturally got to our phones. Moreover the amount of people looking at their smart phones at the subway caught our attention. Thanks to this project we were able to observe how much people, including us, are depending on electronic devices and realize the importance of interaction with people in our modern society. As a result we came up with a map formed by polaroid showing the locations where we got help from people.

We arrived at Hangang around 1pm. Luckily the day was really sunny and because it was Saturday we found quite a lot of people enjoying their picnics at the park. The majority of the people who went were couples, families and some group of friends. At 2pm we started approaching to people asking if they wanted to take polaroid pictures. We thought that polaroid are appropriate for our project’s objective and a good way to emphasize traditional values. Although it is still an electronic device, polaroid are different to digital cameras because you cannot edit or delete the photograph, therefore it makes it more valuable. At the beginning not many people wanted to take pictures so we struggled a little bit. We could see that most of them just wanted to enjoy their times at their private places and would find it uncomfortable when we went to talk to them. When it got late in the afternoon more people started to participate with us. 

Unfortunately it started raining around 7 pm so we had to finish our project.

We managed to take pictures to 16 groups. Out of 16, 8 where couples, the rest of them where group of friends and a dog. 5 groups were celebrating an anniversary and said that they wanted to take the picture to keep it as a memory. Contradictory to our expectations it was mostly men who were more participative than woman and no families groups wanted to take pictures although there were many of them.

MAKING A PRIVATE PLACE

How can a mat and a polaroid picture be a private place? 

Firstly we related a private place with a squared shape.

Square: In geometry, a square is a regular quadrilateral, which means that it has four equal sides and four equal angles (90-degree angles, or right angles). It can also be defined as a 

rectangle in which two adjacent sides have equal length.

According to the anthropologist, Angeles Arrien, 

squares represents safety and security and it is always stable in its place without moving around.

 Most of the architectures are squared and if we look around us, 

starting from windows, walls, tables, doors, all electronic devices 

and even the urban planning are all squared. 

Therefore she believes that human feels security and reliability to squared shapes.

References:

• Arrien, A. (1998) Signs of Life: The Five Universal Shapes And How To Use Them, pp. 174-175.

• Macnab, M. (2011) The Key to Make Everything Look Better: Design By Nature.

Hand Made Map

 PPT Map 

 Result of this Project