Urban Collage believes that a multitude of perspectives, professional or otherwise and built from personal experience, is what it takes to create successful plans and designs. This was never more obvious than in a recent studio in Shanghai, China that included 15 Georgia Tech students (one Collager) and 14 students from Shanghai’s Tongji University. It would seem at first glance that design backgrounds, both professional and educational, could vary widely between the Chinese students and Americans, let alone that one group’s first language is Mandarin, a far cry from understandable to 14 of the 15 American students. So, how could it be that these two groups could cooperate and learn from one another and eventually collaborate on very intriguing conceptual design ideas? The reason this is possible, as it became apparent, is that the group all had the same underlying goals; to create a vibrant plan that improved quality of life within the existing urban core of Shanghai. Using that as the foundation to start communication between the two groups was sufficient. Of course it helped that 90% of the Chinese students spoke English very well, but it was also possible to utilize both group’s backgrounds, that were in fact very different, the Chinese students most of whom have studied in urban planning (a more technical and physical version of what is considered planning in most American schools) while the American students had backgrounds from architecture to environmental planning. It ended up being the very differences between the groups that gave the final products their holistic vision, utilizing the technical aspects of some students and the creative/conceptual aspects of others to generate a final collaborative product that may have otherwise not been achieved.
Much like the experience of the Chinese and American students in Shanghai, the practice of urban design involves people from many different backgrounds and experience. Given a common underlying goal to improve quality of life and leave things better than they were found, these relationships between planners, architects, engineers, residents, public officials and other stakeholders can be understood in a positive light- that the resultant community is richer for the varied perspectives that it embodies.
Cooperation: A Tool for Design
posted by Louis Johnson on March 2nd, 2010Urban Collage believes that a multitude of perspectives, professional or otherwise and built from personal experience, is what it takes to create successful plans and designs. This was never more obvious than in a recent studio in Shanghai, China that included 15 Georgia Tech students (one Collager) and 14 students from Shanghai’s Tongji University. It would seem at first glance that design backgrounds, both professional and educational, could vary widely between the Chinese students and Americans, let alone that one group’s first language is Mandarin, a far cry from understandable to 14 of the 15 American students. So, how could it be that these two groups could cooperate and learn from one another and eventually collaborate on very intriguing conceptual design ideas? The reason this is possible, as it became apparent, is that the group all had the same underlying goals; to create a vibrant plan that improved quality of life within the existing urban core of Shanghai. Using that as the foundation to start communication between the two groups was sufficient. Of course it helped that 90% of the Chinese students spoke English very well, but it was also possible to utilize both group’s backgrounds, that were in fact very different, the Chinese students most of whom have studied in urban planning (a more technical and physical version of what is considered planning in most American schools) while the American students had backgrounds from architecture to environmental planning. It ended up being the very differences between the groups that gave the final products their holistic vision, utilizing the technical aspects of some students and the creative/conceptual aspects of others to generate a final collaborative product that may have otherwise not been achieved.
Much like the experience of the Chinese and American students in Shanghai, the practice of urban design involves people from many different backgrounds and experience. Given a common underlying goal to improve quality of life and leave things better than they were found, these relationships between planners, architects, engineers, residents, public officials and other stakeholders can be understood in a positive light- that the resultant community is richer for the varied perspectives that it embodies.