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The landscape's apprentice: lessons for place-centred design from grounding documentary

Published: 25 February 2008 Publication History

Abstract

We propose that grounding documentaries can help designers to respond to non-western, non-urban spatial infrastructures. We describe locally-produced, in vivo video methods developed by indigenous Elders in Australia to persist and transfer their Traditional Knowledge and the specific use-case of a documentary on fire. The culturally-situated nature of the documentary exposes subtleties in a dialectic between models of space. The ontology embedded in the methods, and expressed by the documentary, has a spatiality and a belonging to place that profoundly differs from that typifying HCI's urban focus and many video methods used by designers to understand useage contexts. Grass-roots driven documentaries ground subsequent design by engaging designers in otherwise inaccessible truths about remote places, partly through the designer's sense of their own felt-life. The fire documentary reveals many general insights for design, such as the need to escape a singularly anthropocentric spatio-temporal approach in order to respond to the plurality of user experience.

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  1. The landscape's apprentice: lessons for place-centred design from grounding documentary

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      DIS '08: Proceedings of the 7th ACM conference on Designing interactive systems
      February 2008
      487 pages
      ISBN:9781605580029
      DOI:10.1145/1394445
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 25 February 2008

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      Author Tags

      1. conservation
      2. felt-life
      3. fire
      4. habitus
      5. indexicality
      6. indigenous people
      7. rural
      8. spatiality
      9. traditional knowledge
      10. video

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      February 25 - 27, 2008
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      • (2022)Aboriginal Design ProcessDesign Praxiology and Phenomenology10.1007/978-981-19-2806-2_9(147-170)Online publication date: 4-Sep-2022
      • (2021)Land, Water and SunProceedings of the 2021 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3461778.3462104(1954-1969)Online publication date: 28-Jun-2021
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