For our first brief, I investigated the basketball courts at Millfields Park. At first, I experimented with photographing/filming, collecting, notetaking and sketching.
Photos and videos evoked different feelings depending on framing, angle, distance, and exposure. They were easy to register, so I produced many images and had time to reflect on them. It was also practical to revisit the material and find out new information later.
Collecting objects from the site required close attention to detail. It felt immersive and helped me imagine how they ended up here.
Notetaking was a slow activity, so it takes time to generate ideas, but as I was writing I could focus and reflect on the place’s history and pay attention to details.
Later when I looked back at my notes, I imagined new possibilitys for the questions I had raised.
Sketching was s a good way to visualise ideas freely. I can change proportions, perspective, focus and level of detail to highlight specific areas of interest.
Because it is a linear activity, I connected to each subject as I was drawing them.
Chosen method
The method I explored further next was a mix of photographing, filming and notetaking on-site and image review and notetaking off-site.
While photos and videos are easy and fast to take and notetaking is slower, both methods made me reflect as I was creating records on-site and generated material that’s practical to review later off-site.
Findings
About the method
There are many ways you can revisit the material. You can look at the images chronologically, in a random order, by size, colour or theme, for example. Different approaches to reading the photos and films can result in different discoveries.
You can read the notes multiple times, make more notes and so on. I grouped and numbered my notes for organisational purposes and explored the relationship between these clusters.
A discovery can come from something you have seen before or from a detail in a photo or video that you didn’t notice when shooting. It’s possible to have new ideas just by remembering the images without having them with you, by talking to people or by showing them the material. Different people will come up with unique findings.
Reading ↔ Writing
It may be impossible to write without, at the same time, cheking your writing, that is, reading. And when you read something, written by yourself or by others, you make it your own. You simultaneously read and create, or write, new meaning.
The image-notes compositions can also render new findings after further reading since they are a new way of displaying information.
All these variations of the method, or sub-methods, or open-ended approach, can be used to generate new findings.