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

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.