Best Work from the Reading Places Project

The following text gives an a few examples of the best work we encountered across the different categories of assessment for the Reading Places project. There are inevitably too much good work to include everything here but these should give you an example of what we were looking for and hopefully some useful advice for the future. Apologies for the relatively low quality of the images used here – they were taken from my phone and have inevitably lost some resolution being presented in this format.

PRESENTATION AND COMMUNICATION

One of the real significant changes from the work I marked in Project 1 has been a general increase in the standard and professionalism of your presentations. For many groups the oral presentation was well organised and clear and targeted for an audience. The key to this is both preparation and having a structured narrative which follows the design process from context and concept to general strategy. In most cases this was also backed up by an almost professional level of graphical presentation. Where there were problems with the overall level of presentation, this tended to be because of relatively simple mistakes like missing labels and titles. Most groups experimented with computer graphics for the first time with many people opting for multimedia presentations using a combination of Photoshop, SketchUp and AutoCAD work. This experimentation often had mixed results as it was acknowledge that what people saw on the screen wasn’t what appeared in print. This is a really important lesson and only comes from practice.

My prize for best presented work is shown in the images below. Although there is, perhaps, a little too much information on the page it is clearly presented and the quality of the graphic design is such that all the labels can be read and the diagrams can be read as a sequence and used to reference the main master plan.

One distinction we made in the review is between communication and presentation. Whilst we saw a number of 1^st Class presentations not all of them were good pieces of communication. By presentation I mean good page layout, appropriate selection of media and graphic design techniques, neatness etc. A great presentation however does not necessarily mean that it is an effective piece of communication. The key to getting the communication right is to make sure that you select the appropriate images and that all the drawings read in unison – i.e. they reference one another. Common problems where that graphics had been selected because they looked good rather than that they helped tell us anything about the design Conversely many of the less successful work in terms of presentation where better in terms of communication. Ultimately our focus is on the design outcome and you need to give us all the help that you can in terms of both presentation and communication. Here I will concentrate on the main Master Plan Graphic.

This image shows a reasonably successful central master plan graphic. The key things to note here are the clear distinction between the proposed and existing buildings and this is further helped by clear labelling.

This was the only hand drawn master plan we saw and demonstrates the extra level of control you have with hand drawn graphics in terms of the quality of line and the subtlety of fill. Again the built intervention is clearly differentiated from the existing context:

Control over the graphical presentation is very important when you are using other people’s drawings – particularly things like OS maps. Many people used Digimap output as the basis of their presentations but these maps were often reproduced at a level of detail that was wrong with unnecessary labels and supplementary information that cluttered the final drawing. I’ve chosen this plan because of its clarity and that it is stripped back to show the right level of detail:

ANALYSIS AND SYNTHESIS

Like communication and presentation it is important to separate out analysis and synthesis. With only one or two exceptions the analysis work we saw was of a high standard (helped in part by your use of the Space Syntax document). Synthesis, however, was less successful in many cases either because it had been done but not presented properly or because there was gap between the analysis and design phases of the project. I use the work synthesis to describe the translation of analysis data on the site into the framework for design. A significant example of this is shown in the image below where the column of diagrams on the right represents site analysis before the proposed intervention and the images on the left represent the effect of the proposal:

In many, if not the majority of cases the critical pieces of site analysis and synthesis were hidden in the supplementary material. When doing the assessment work we found a treasure trove of hidden design work much of which we felt could be selected for the A1 sheets. The problem with sorting through the supplementary material when attempting to make an assessment of this work is both the time it takes to find the relevant information in piles of other exploratory work and then to try to tie it in to what we see on the wall. I felt on a number of occasions that we might have awarded a higher degree class if the appropriate analysis material had been shown with the final design. That said I include a few of the many examples that we found of excellent supplementary work and a couple of examples of the work we found hidden in the extra material:

Another aspect to consider in analysis and synthesis is your understanding of the brief and the clients needs. One particularly effective method used by 2 or 3 of the groups was to start their presentations with a discussion of the aims of the university and, in a number of cases to track down and read the universities strategic report. There is inevitably ‘hidden’ information in these documents and understanding the clients culture and aspirations is an important aspect of being able to design effectively. Group 7 for example wanted to highlight their translation of the universities aims an objectives along side their site analysis:

DESIGN OUTCOME

If you get everything else right then the design should emerge naturally. Easier said than done of course but I don’t think that we saw a single ‘wrong’ answer to the design brief. Where marks did get lost tended to be in cases where either the design solution was not properly rationalised in terms of analysis and synthesis or where there simply wasn’t enough declared – i.e. we couldn’t see what the final design strategy actually was. I think one of the key challenges was selecting the appropriate level of detail. Whilst this isn’t much comfort to you now I have examples of good work from this year it will be easier to brief next years students! There was one design outcome that stood out to me for its clarity and ingenuity. The best mark went, without any doubt, to group 26. It was a difficult strategy to choose the site to the north of the campus but this group managed to produce, not only the most effective graphical presentation of anyone but also the most persuasive argument for the development of this patch of land.

It’s a winner on both marks and for the competition. No prizes I’m afraid but a great start for next year!