RMIT PlaceLab Melbourne
17-21 Cardigan St, Carlton VIC 3053
Please send your expression of Interest to participate to:
melbourne.placelab@rmit.edu.au
before Friday 23 September.
Do cities have moods?
How do cities make sense of the moods of citizens? Do cities have moods? How can ‘mood’ and the practices of mapping and moodboarding become speculative tools for imagining imagine future designs for resilient cities?
This two-hour workshop invites participants to discuss and participate in playful experiments to generate collaborative maps of the future city of Melbourne, creating layers of resilience to current dystopian and utopian simplifications of our futures. What mood do we want in our future places? What should the future city feel like, if we want to call it “resilient?” And what role can different people play in placemaking?
As part of the workshop, participants will discuss how sensory and textural experiences like “mood” become meaningful information for building better futures in times of global crisis.
WORKSHOP FACILITATORS
Professor Larissa Hjorth
This workshop is facilitated by Larissa Hjorth. She is a socially engaged artist and digital ethnographer with vast leadership experience managing complex stakeholders within and outside the academy. Larissa is Distinguished Professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University.
Professor Annette Markham
Annette Markham is the academic lead on the ‘In the Mood’ Research Project.
She has extensive experience with conducting participatory workshops as part of arts-based interventions for social change. Annette is Professor within the School of Media and Communication and Co-Director of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre at RMIT University.
CREDITS
This workshop is part of Professor Annette Markham’s larger research project ‘In The Mood’ focused on moodboarding as a citizen social science method. The project includes three additional workshops in 2022 –in Barcelona, Brunswick, and Ho Chi Minh City.
The ‘Mapping Moods for Future Cities – Melbourne’ Workshop is presented by RMIT PlaceLab and supported by RMIT’s Digital Ethnography Research Centre. It is aligned with The Big Anxiety Festival 2022 presented by RMIT University.
- Spaces are limited and by invite only. Please send us a note before Sept 23 if you want to participate.
- Facilitators will introduce the idea and premises of maps and their connection to moods.
- Participants will work individually with visual and textural materials in the space to visualise their mood map of the city, based on their own experiences and feelings.
- Groups will generate a visual and sensory map of the future city, focusing on mood, and then build additional transparent layers of “resilience” to add to their group map.
- We’ll finish this workshop by discussing the challenges of the exercises, as well as discuss the value of these “maps” for community building, citizens “resetting” their own cities, and planners using these as tools for facilitating more resilient city futures.