Mapping spatial practices and social distancing in smart schools: Sensory and digital ethnographic methods

Lead Research Organisation: Manchester Metropolitan University
Department Name: Faculty of Education

Abstract

This 18 month interdisciplinary project collaborates across the fields of Education, Architecture, and Design to improve our understanding of the lived experience of school buildings. This project combines sensory ethnographic methods with social mapping methods, to trace complex networks of relationality and spatial practices in buildings. Our aim is to generate new mapping methods that better document the sensory-affective dimensions of school environments. These dynamic maps will offer time-lapse representations of how staff and students experience the school buildings, shedding light on problematic spaces in the built environment. This constitutes a cutting-edge methodological approach that assembles participatory methods of design-based research with sensory ethnographic mapping. This hybrid ethnographic method involves following the key actors involved (staff, students, visitors, stakeholders), while also attending to the sensory force and impact of the built environment itself. The research team will collect sensory ethnographic data, codify and correlate with voiced/texted concerns regarding building use, assemble the data using mapping software, and create dynamic visualizations of the spatial practices and sensory environment, as it mutates over a 9 month period of time.

Working with three secondary schools in Liverpool, our iterative research design involves alternating between 3-month cycles of ethnographic study and 3-month cycles of data processing and map making, for a total of 9 months in the schools. Our methods directly involve school communities in collaborative processes of collectively mapping the complex sensory-affective spatial practices within their buildings. Young people at the schools will increase their understanding of smart architecture and passive sensor technology through their participation in the project. Workshops with students and staff will commence in the first 2 months, exploring participatory methods for sensory ethnography in smart schools. The cycles of ethnography and mapping will follow. Co-designed interventions in schools aim to address problematic spaces during mapping phases. The research team will meet with an advisory group 5 times over the 18 months, which includes experts in UK school architecture, learning environments, and digital design, as well as representatives from the schools.

We are partnering with an architecture firm esteemed for their school architecture, and their national and international contributions, over the last two decades, to education learning environment policy. The participating schools were built by the architecture firm, which is contributing person-hours throughout the project, as well as school architectural plans and blueprints, and other planning documents used to visualize the occupant experience. We are also working with a design company that focuses on innovative wearable sensor technologies and citizen science, with experience in school building interventions. The project is situated in our Manifold Laboratory for Biosocial, Eco-sensory, and Digital Studies of Learning and Behaviour, where we have access to equipment and research infrastructure (www.biosocialresearchlab.com).

Academic and creative outputs will include (a) a project website, documenting both research process and findings, with a secure blog for posting news and progress, (b) project exhibitions and events in Liverpool public-access sites, such as The Baltic Triangle PLACED digital academy, and Make Liverpool North Docks Warehouse, and the Manchester Whitworth Young Contemporaries space, and Manchester School of Architecture, (c) academic publications (3), conference papers (3), and a report to local education agencies. Findings will also be shared with the Association for Learning Environments (ALE-UK), the UK National Data Archive, and the learning environment group at the OECD.
 
Description 1- We addressed the symbiotic relation of architecture and education and analysed the performative spatial machinery of contemporary school buildings (in contrast to traditional ones). We concluded:

First, it is important to note that the increased flexibility and openness of the 'new generation of school building' facilitates and multiplies the forms of control. This is expressed in the following features: 1. Control is multiple and is performed through the visibility of both objects and subjects, and the invisibility of the power and the multiple viewing points from which it is exercised. 2. The vertical and horizontal lines of communication are also multiple and organised in a complex way (ie the heartspace, atria and other features). 3. The openness is balanced with features such as spaces for seclusion, privacy, retreat and control; the architectural techniques for separating of the individual from the crowd are diversified as well (ie the corridor and the toilet). 4. Both the construction of relationships, so essential of the school system, and the dissolution of relations and groups, are delegated to specific architectural devices (ie the windowed door of the teacher).

Second, we have demonstrated that the objective spaces of a school building are not the 'depth' features on which the psychological world or subjective experiences of students and teachers would be built. Dwelling in schools, children and teachers actively deform and inflect both time and space, that is, by actively spacing and timing educational activities in a way that multiplies the forms of control. Thus, instead of dissipating or reducing control, or merely re-producing the classic forms of panopticon- or synopticon- types of power, this versatile and porous type of architecture, diversifies the orbits of control operating through multiple and intersecting lines of sight and sound.

Third, rather than being a static frame for educational activities, a school building is to be understood as a node of a complex network of circuits defined by entries and exits, apertures and closures, spatial transitions, flows and movements. Its architecture can never be defined in metric or formalistic terms, but as a set of navigational techniques, imposing frequencies, enabling movements, enhancing visibility and sound, impeding and even changing the speed of navigation.

2- We explored the relation of architecture with diagramming and visualisation as powerful devices to connect, generate and synthesise spatial knowledge about socio-material-affective experience at the school building. This has generated the following findings:

First, despite the powerful tools that are currently at hand in architecture and design, the visualisations of school buildings are commonly created by architecture firms that deploy space as an empty and stable plan. These visualisations seem more concerned with the use of visual technologies for augmenting realism (rendering of surfaces, colours, textures, materials), rather than deploying them as tools for investigation, analysis, critique, and speculation.

Second, we have developed other potential ways of visualizing the school building that rather than beginning from an idealised projection that is indifferent to the local movement of things, start from the ground paying attention, connecting, folding and mapping sensory-ethnographic data of movements, transits, occupations, times, flows of different human and non-human actants in the school building. This changed the status of the visualizations from fixed and complete images of the school building to partial representations of provisional states in which the building could be understood as constantly produced by its movements, but also by the methods that seek to explore it in new ways (beyond the location maps, orthographic drawings, crossections) shaping other possibilities for thinking, visualizing and modelling space-times. In tracking how bodies and things unfold through the space-times of the school day, our mappings are useful to understand how the lived experience in the school building is always highly situated, open-ended and co-composed with things that come forth at every given moment and movement. Rather than thinking linearly or statically or in distinct and idealised experiences associated to atria, rings, auditoria, open spaces, the maps offer a more complex sense of life as made of frictions, collisions, encounters, overlaps, junctions that unfold, gather speed and dissolve across space-times, materializing different and heterogenous living landscapes that can help understand school buildings from the perspective of its inhabitants.

Third, we have experimented with architectural 3D visualisations facilitated through the potential of CAD software to generate repeatable variations of a group of spaces in the building situating them in flux. We have explored how such method can contribute to processes of participative design/ethnography centred on the articulation of school re-design ideas with school building dwellers. The process of visualizing specific transformations brings participants to confront the demands of materiality, the agency of things, the assembled force of entities and their effects on common life. As a result, collective process of visualization incite more nuanced, complex, and manifold approaches, where personal experiences of the study room feeling bland or the 6th form hub feeling exposed, clunky and uncomfortable can be perceived less personally and more ecologically as specific trajectories or exchanges within compounded envelops. These collective visualisations were key to foreground school design's entanglement with immanent critique through its capacity to stay close to the interactions of things and users as a method to appraise what needs to matter less in the present life of the school building. They also were important in highlighting design's speculative capacity to evoke alternative thoughts and to explore and entertain new spatial-material-embodied possibilities of life and learning in school buildings.

3- We have developed methods of digital-sensory ethnography in collaboration with school dwellers to study the school building through practices of distributed sensation that foreground the relation of new school architecture and the modulating power of sensor systems. We have concluded that:

First, experimental collaborations in sensory-ethnography, where building dwellers enacted habitual movements in the school building while utilizing portable sensor technologies, were key in materializing experiences in which sensing was not perceived as the individual capacity of a body or a device, but a distributed ecological composition in the school building.

Second, such experimental collaborations were key to foreground that participants' capacities to register change in the materiality of the school building were dependent of their associations with chains of sensors and the specific modes of environmental mediation and modulation that these chains generated. This concerned too sensors that were embedded and black boxed in the architecture and its systems.

Third, exploring different compositions of sensors, dwellers activity, and the materiality of school spaces was important to facilitate conceptual discussions on what school spaces are made of. Experiments in distributed sensing destabilize distinctions such as open, closed, inside, outside, visible, invisible, solid, porous, smooth, granular, static, moving, edged, continuous that orient specific behaviours and ways of using school spaces commonly defined by regulatory protocols and tacit expectations on good school behaviour.

Fourth, more extended collaborations with school building dwellers in designing and experimenting with compositions of sensors seem key in building technical capability and creativity in sensing practices. This is significant as a way of increasing autonomy around designs, methods, interventions in distributed sensing as well as capacity in responding to spatial and ecological matters of concern in the school building. Such expertise would be important too in articulating political questions and proposing alternatives around the use and governance of new school architectures.
Exploitation Route - The methods of digital-sensory ethnography and the associated experiments of distributed sensed can be further explored and experimented with school dwellers to build technical capability and creativity in sensing practices. It is key to extend research in the potential of these methods to increase school dwellers autonomy around designs, methods, interventions in distributed sensing as well as capacity in responding to spatial and ecological matters of concern in the school building. This aspect of the research was initiated by our project but due to the limited access we had to the participants due to Covid restrictions we could not extended as much as we aimed too.

- The methods of diagramming and visualisation of school spaces have the potential to be applied to the study of other school buildings and educational institutions. They also can be used in action-oriented pedagogical initiatives and in complement with the sensory-digital methods so school dwellers have opportunities to envision the building as always in constant change, and as a multiplicity of movements, frictions, landings, encounters.

- There is in general a lack of research that looks symbiotically at the relation of new school architecture and education from an ANT perspective where a school architecture works as machine that connects entities to other entities, forming relations and symbiotic mediations. We sustain that by developing this perspective, we can have a better understanding of the lived experiences in school buildings. While widely developed in buildings of science, this type of research is just nascent in the study of school architectures.
Sectors Communities and Social Services/Policy,Construction,Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Education,Environment,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections
URL https://www.schoolatmospheres.net/
 
Description The study had impact on the group of Year 12 students participating in the study. The development of the workshops on sensory-digital ethnography (6) and prototyping (3) with the group of 16 Year 12s at Gatacre provided the young people with knowledge, methods, techniques, and technical tools to develop eco-sensory research in the school environment, document socio-material-technical processes generated by design, and utilize the collected data to justify possibilities for re-design. By practicing the methods and techniques with members of the research team while living and moving through the school building, the collaborating students extended understanding of school design as something that is not a mere background to their lives, but something that is agentic and interactive, that shapes possibilities of dwelling (learning and living) in the school building. As such, the collaborating students understood their school design not simply as a thing but as a process that materializes specific socio-material-technical relations in the building and that has an impact in their individual and common lives. - The first set of workshops helped the collaborating group of students to document, respond to, reflect on specific socio-material-technical-affective relations in a group of 6 key spaces defining central aspects of their dwelling experience. - The second set of workshops guided the group of young people in developing and refining propositions for re-design for the group 6 key spaces. This was done through processes of making and discussing three series of conceptual and speculative prototypes that helped them understand how processes of making and remaking are central in understanding and communicating how design can make certain material practices matter, especially how material practices could foster more heterogeneous modes of inhabitation in the building including the more playful, relaxed, intimate, quiet modes of sociality desired by the students. Documentations, visualizations and examples of re-design prototypes co-created with the students were presented at the exhibition "The School Building: Speculative Models, Sensory Envelops, and Socio Semantic Maps at the prestigious Nottingham Contemporary Gallery", where academics but also members of the public engaged in the issues, methods and ideas of researching the interaction of school design with life in school buildings with staff and students.
Sector Education
Impact Types Societal
 
Description Research Grants on Education: Large
Amount $246,051 (USD)
Organisation Spencer Foundation 
Sector Charity/Non Profit
Country United States
Start 09/2023 
End 08/2026
 
Title Mapping building controversies 
Description Software such as VOSviewer, Cortext, gephi, rawgraphs has been used to create maps that trace complex networks of relationality of three smart secondary school buildings in Liverpool built under the programme Schools for the Future. This method has used key documents including media, architectural documentation, Oftsed Reports, and interview data to follow key actors in the school. 
Type Of Material Improvements to research infrastructure 
Year Produced 2022 
Provided To Others? No  
Impact The mapping controversies method is not new to architecture. Yaneva co-PI and Blackwell RA have applied it to the research of different buildings nationally and internationally. The method does not constrain the observation to any single theory or methodology. The assumption is that buildings are phenomena that should be observed from as many viewpoints as possible and the actors' voices listened to more than the researcher's own assumptions. The purpose of the resulting cartography is not to teach actors somehow connected to the building what are the limits of their understanding but to learn from them how to observe their lived experiences. The method has been applied to emblematic buildings that have received extensive media attention, but it has been rarely employed for the study of secondary school buildings. Its use in this research can help us understand and create powerful visualisations of secondary schools key actors' lived experiences. Our aim is also to explore ways in which both the textual interview data but also the sensory data co-produced with students in the bespoken workshops can be folded into these cartographies. 
 
Title Mapping envelopment with Year 12 students in selected school spaces through a combination of digital methods including 3D scanning, diagramming room atmospheres, sound recording 
Description In a workshop students have been trained to use the app Polycam to create 3D scans of favourite rooms in the building. After the scanning is done the app can render the room or the space in 3D. However, the rendering presents flaws and holes. This proves useful to generate discussions with the students on architectural aspects defining the rooms, such as scale, dimensionality, and materiality and how these aspects provide a specific feeling and experience of the room. The similarities and differences rendered in the scanned 3D image are used as a prompt to initiate this conversation. In a second workshop the students have copied one fragment of the generated room scans (e.g. stairs, the atrium, the music area). The picture is exported into Procreate (a drawing app), and different layers are used to diagram scent, air and temperature by developing exercices of deep listening, scent mapping, and using the flow air sensor. This has allowed them to provide accounts of how the young people feels embodied in these rooms by feeling air, light, sound and other atmospheric conditions. 
Type Of Material Improvements to research infrastructure 
Year Produced 2022 
Provided To Others? No  
Impact These workshops have been essential in developing participative methods with youth that are effective in eliciting responses on their sensed and affective experience of inhabiting specific rooms and spaces in the school building. The activities and outcomes generated with the youth have provided directions on how to continue developing the bespoken methods to generate more comprehensive atmospheric mappings of the school building. 
 
Title Mapping flow in the school and outside through video methods and with Year 12 students 
Description In three consecutive workshops Year 12 students have been trained to utilise Go-Pro video cameras and to develop a method of filming while moving that we have named navigational videos. These navigational videos center on walking their daily itineraries inside the school and in their journeys school-home. The camera is in front of them facing the architectural space, avoiding to directly record their bodies, and focusing on their movement through spaces, in moments of speed, stasis and navigation through obstacles and other built volumes. Once the videos have been generated, we used video editing apps like iMovie, Quik and Hyperspektiv as methods to explore their movement temporality, color, and ambience and how those aspects can transform the sense of movement and flow. Making, watching and editing the videos has been useful to increase awareness and elicit conversations about students embodied experience of moving through the building, issues of repetition and frequence in their movement, the temporality of moving from space to space, the feeling of certain spaces in terms of scale and vertical-horizontal dimensions. 
Type Of Material Improvements to research infrastructure 
Year Produced 2022 
Provided To Others? No  
Impact This method has been effective in creating sensory data on the experience of moving through the school and transiting through different spaces. The available architectural designs of the building movement and flow provided by BDP are 2-dimensional and do not attend to the lived experience of embodied movement. The video data introduces temporal, volumetric dimension of movement flow. The aim of the project is to find ways of folding these different types of data into interactive maps. 
 
Title Mapping perceptions of the school environment with the SUPERPOWER app 
Description The SUPERPOWER app is a design by artist Lin Tan (Umbrellium). It allowed a group of sixteen students to generate and collect environmental data using their personal phones and focusing on how well/not well some spaces feel at school. The app facilitates research on the perception of spaces by registering geo-location, perception rating, a photograph of the space and a commentary. The data collected and its collective discussion allowed to make tangible issues of space, materiality, temperature, light, organization, sound etc. that are sometimes difficult to describe or speak about. The app helped students to generated data that let them to individually respond to the usability of certain school spaces, and to establish propositions for spatial improvement. Students developed these propositions in concept prototypes built in cardboard and other craft materials. 
Type Of Material Improvements to research infrastructure 
Year Produced 2022 
Provided To Others? No  
Impact Tan has used the app in different projects nationally and internationally but frequently the research has focused around perceptions in the city outdoors, and the geo-location data has been linked to Google Maps. These projects have included perceptions of safety in the city, or perceptions of air quality in pandemic times. The use of SUPERPOWER in the context of our project involved an adaptation to be effective inside the school building. The solution was to link the geo-location data to the school floor plan. 
URL https://superpower.lingql.com/
 
Title Mapping Spatial Practices and Social Distancing in Smart Schools: Sensory and Digital Ethnographic Methods. [Data Set] 
Description This data set contains all the publicly accessible documents, data, visualizations and models generated for the ESRC funded project "Mapping Spatial Practices and Social Distancing in Smart Schools: Sensory and Digital Ethnographic Methods" ES/V006436 
Type Of Material Database/Collection of data 
Year Produced 2023 
Provided To Others? Yes  
Impact Because this dataset has to be published by the end of March 2023, we are not aware yet of its impacts. 
 
Description Ling Tan - Umbrellium (Artist/Designer Consultant) 
Organisation Umbrellium Ltd
Country United Kingdom 
Sector Private 
PI Contribution - De Freitas, Trafi-Prats, Yaneva and McCauley participated in preparatory meetings to support Ling Tan's in the design of the workshop to be delivered at the partnering school. The aim was to ensure that the workshop connected with the foci of the project on the built environment and more specifically on the school building. - Trafi-Prats organised Tan's visit itinerary and coordinated with curriculum manager at the school to schedule days and times and pedagogical structure of the workshop. - Trafi-Prats supported administrative process with RKE office at MMU to make effective the partnership contract, travel, lodging and payment to Ling Tan - Trafi-Prats, McCauley, Duggan supported Ling Tan in the delivery of her workshops, more specifically in relation to materials management, communication with students and staff and documentation of processes. - Trafi-Prats and deFreitas hosted two additional 2-hour meetings with Tan to discuss the process and outcomes of her workshop at Gatacre in July 2022 and January 2023.
Collaborator Contribution Tan is an artist and designer focused on participatory processes of citizen-led data, empowering participants to express their relations with their city and immediate environments, responding to critical environmental issues and effecting change. Her contributions to the project have been the following: - One 9-hour workshop led by artist Ling Tan over the course of three days (9-11 of February). This workshop led students to the collection on environmental data on the the school building using Ling Tan's app SUPERPOWER. - The SUPERPOWER app was adapted to collect data in and of the school building and to link data to its floor plans. - Ling Tan led twelve students to design conceptual prototypes of potential building improvements connected to the data collected with the SUPERPOWER app.
Impact - Adaptation of the SUPERPOWER app to collect environmental data connected to the school building, linking it to the building floor plans. - Dataset of students environmental perceptions of spaces in the building using Ling Tan SUPERPOWER App that incorporates data connected to geo-Location, perception rating, photo and written commentary. - Twelve conceptual prototypes designed by students of building modifications. These modifications are contextualised and justified using the data collected through the SUPERPOWER app.
Start Year 2022
 
Title Ling Tan's app SUPERPOWER was adapted to do research inside the school building 
Description The SUPERPOWER app is a design by artist Lin Tan (Umbrellium). It allowed a group of sixteen students to generate and collect environmental data using their personal phones and focusing on how well/not well some spaces feel at school. The app facilitates research on the perception of space by registering geo-location, perception rating, a photograph of the space and a commentary. The data collected and its collective discussion allowed to make tangible issues of space, materiality, temperature, light, organization, sound and so on that are sometimes difficult to describe or speak about. Tan has used the app in different projects nationally and internationally but frequently it has involved perceptions in the city outdoors. These have included for example perceptions of safety in the city, or perceptions of air quality in pandemic times. For our study the SUPERPOWER software was adapted to be used inside the school building, which required to link the geo-location data to the school floor plan. 
Type Of Technology Webtool/Application 
Year Produced 2022 
Impact Because students had the app in their own phones they had more individual autonomy in self-directing the data collection, defining and deepening the building controversies that they aimed to study. 
URL https://superpower.lingql.com/
 
Description "The school building: Speculative models, sensory envelopes, and socio-semantic maps" at Nottingham Contemporary -The Space (November 9th, 2022) 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach National
Primary Audience Postgraduate students
Results and Impact The exhibition "The school building: Speculative models, sensory envelopes, and socio-semantic maps" presented mappings and visualizations that rendered the school building as a living structure through the use of socio-semantic, sensory and digital ethnographic methods. The exhibition addressed the following questions:

- What can we learn about school design by mapping the relations among actors mobilised in different phases of a building's life?
- How new school architecture deploys forms of authority?
- How do students enter, traverse, and inhabit school spaces?
- What kinds of embodied and sensory engagement shape the spatial experience?
- How does speculative modelling help us re-imagine and re-design the school building to incorporate these other dimensions of experience?

The maps and visualisations presented in the exhibition actively sought to envision the school building not as a fixed and completed object but as a living map and resonant milieu. They connected and layered different data sets, including existing and historical architectural documents and designs along with interview and sensory ethnographic data generated in collaboration with staff and students from a secondary school in a large urban area of England's Northwest, designed and constructed with fundings from the national program Building Schools for the Future. The show explored the power of socio-semantic mapping, digital sensors and speculative models to rewire the senses and pose radical questions about the forms of dwelling, living, moving that become possible and impossible through school design.

The impact of the exhibition was on academics and post-graduate students who attended the opening (November 9th). We engaged people directly, discussed specific elements of the research, how they connected to fieldwork, data, to interdisciplinary ethos of the research, and how it differentiated to existing research in school buildings. Due to unexpected train strikes several tickets reservations from students and academics in Sheffield, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, got cancelled and the majority of attendance involved academics in Nottingham, but still there were exceptions from the aforementioned locations that drove and attended the event.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2022
URL https://www.schoolatmospheres.net/blog/the-school-building-exhibition-as-a-site-for-post-graduate-st...
 
Description 9-hour workshop led by artist and designer Ling Tan with twelve Year 12 students at the partner school (9-11 February, 2022) 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Local
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact This 9-hour workshop led by artist Ling Tan was conducted at the partnering school over the course of three days (9-11, February 2022). Tan trained sixteen Year 12 students to collect environmental data of the building by using her app SUPERPOWER in their cell phones. This allowed students to collect data from specific spaces in the school to which they connected to previous stories and experiences that made these spaces to work well or not so well. The data includes: Geo-location, perception rating, photographs of the chosen space and comments. Based on the data collected, the students designed and built conceptual prototypes for potential spatial improvements. Students presented their prototypes to Tan, researchers Trafi-Prats and Duggan, and two of their teachers. The prototypes were documented.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2022
 
Description Four ethnographic interviews to staff working in the partner school (October 2021-January 2022) 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Local
Primary Audience Study participants or study members
Results and Impact We have conducted four ethnographic interviews to staff in the partner school. The time of each interview has ranged between 30-45 minutes. The interviews have explored: 1- how each participant moves and uses specific spaces and systems in the building to develop their professional practice and their everyday life in the building; 2- Perception of specific atmospheric qualities (e.g. air, temperature, light, sound) and how these are shaped by the constructed environment; 3- Potential changes and spatial re-arrangements generated by the Covid-19 pandemic. 4- Walks through the building that follow the interviewed participants' daily activity, and visit their habitual spaces.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2021,2022
 
Description Institutional press release to announce the start of the study (March 2021) 
Form Of Engagement Activity A press release, press conference or response to a media enquiry/interview
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Other audiences
Results and Impact Manchester Metropolitan University press office released a long statement that PI de Freitas wrote informing about the award. The statement detailed the study's focus, aims, methods and impact, and highlighted the interdisciplinary focus across education and architecture. Additionally, the statement described how the study addressed the gap in research about the lived experience in school buildings and problematised the passive collection of data that occured in smart buildings. It also remarked the study's interest in developing innovate visualisation methods through patching mapping software with new sensory/environmental data and art/design interventions, and to demonstrate ways in which learning environments facilitate different kinds of agency and participation. The press release was subsequently linked and re-distributed through social networks.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2021
URL https://www.mmu.ac.uk/education/about-us/news/story/?id=13779
 
Description Participation in an International Seminar on Research in new Learning Environments - 14 June 2023 
Form Of Engagement Activity A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Other audiences
Results and Impact This is an international seminar organised by Reader Michael Gallagher (Manchester Metropolitan University) centred on presenting and discussing new research in learning environments with the key to map key issues and new methods and directions in this type of research. Other presenters include Professor Abigail Hackett (Sheffield Hallam University), Professor Peter Kraftl (University of Birmingham), Michael Gallagher (Manchester Metropolitan University) and Gail Yuen (Hong Kong University). The seminar will take place in June 14, 2020, it will incorporate face to face and online participation and it is aimed both to a national and international audience.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2023
 
Description Presentation of the project in National Research Network (December 2021) 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact The project was presented during the debate generated in an online seminar of the Livingmaps network. The seminar focalized on presenting and discussing a series of London-based projects involving children and youth in mapping their spatial experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic. The debate provided opportunities for other researchers to inform about other mapping related projects initiated and/or completed during the pandemic. The brief presentation of our study generated interest, especially for its focus on architecture and school spaces, because many of the network's projects center on outside spaces in the city. There was curiosity too on the use of digital methods. This interaction was followed by an email from the network coordinator with an invitation to present the study process and outcomes in the future.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2021
URL https://www.livingmaps.org/
 
Description Presentation of the project in Research Institute (April 2021) 
Form Of Engagement Activity A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach National
Primary Audience Other audiences
Results and Impact This activity consisted in presenting the award to our research institute at MMU, ESRI. Above 50 researchers and ESRI members attended the presentation. The presentation generated discussion and interest in the projects' questions, methods and potential contributions.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2021
 
Description Reading group on concepts and methods connected to mapping and visualisation (January 2022-ongoing) 
Form Of Engagement Activity A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Other audiences
Results and Impact This reading group has been organised by Co-PI Professor Liz de Freitas and focuses on current publications addressing interdisciplinary concepts and methods of mapping and visualisation, linking philosophy, social research and the arts. Since January 2022 three 90-minutes meetings have been celebrated via Zoom to discuss the book by Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman (2021). Investigative aesthetics: Conflicts and commons in the politics of truth. London: Verso. The participants in this group include study researchers, de Freitas, Trafi-Prats and Duggan, as well as of other scholars and practitioners in the fields or the arts, social sciences, education and theory/philosophy in the USA, Ireland, Canada and the U.K. The activity of the group is ongoing.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2022
 
Description Six participative workshops with sixteen 12-Year students at the partner school on sensory digital methods to inquire on the lived experience of the school environment (November 2021-January 2022) 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Local
Primary Audience Study participants or study members
Results and Impact The development of six 2-hours workshops (November 21-January 22) with the aim of involving young people (school pupils) on the inquiry of their lived experience of the school building. The workshops have trained young people in the use of digital methods to explore experiences such as: envelopment, flow, perspective, trajectories, sound, through methods such as: spatial scanning, video-recording of itineraries, mapping the environmental experiences of the journey school-home, photo elicitation of threshold experiences, room atmospheres diagrams. The workshops have generated critical data around architectural experiences of flow, perspective, atmosphere, sound to form an initial understanding on emergent understanding of students' lived experience of the building.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2021,2022
 
Description Three participative workshops with sixteen 12-Year students at the partner school on prototyping methods to generate and discuss re-designs of 6 key spaces (March-May 2022) 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Local
Primary Audience Schools
Results and Impact We guided the group of participating students (16) in developing and refining prototypes for re-design for a group 6 key spaces that they had identified as gathering multiple concerns . This was done through an iterative process processes of making and discussing three sets of conceptual and speculative prototypes. This was the first time that students in the school had been invited and guided in thinking critically, conceptually and speculatively about altering their own school environment. Engaging in processes of making, discussing and remaking of these prototypes were key in refining, focalizing and collectivizing how different re-designs could transform socio-material practices at the school fostering more heterogeneous modes of inhabitation in the building; including the more playful, relaxed, intimate, quiet modes of sociality that students expressed to be currently impossible in the school building.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2022
 
Description White Rose funded Doctoral Training on Advanced Research Methods, with the title "Digital-sensory methods: Working in the field with an affective-ecological paradigm" - November 10th, 2022 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach National
Primary Audience Postgraduate students
Results and Impact We offered a half day workshop funded by WhiteRose DRT and directed to doctoral students in education and social science pathways on Advanced Research Methods. It had title 'Digital-sensory methods: Working in the field with an affective-ecological paradigm'. It was delivered at The Space a multifunctional large room at Nottingham Contemporary Gallery, Nottingham. It reached 20 participants from different universities including Nottingham, Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester Metropolitan. We utilised the exhibition 'The school building: Speculative Models, Sensory Envelopes and Socio-Semantic maps' to discuss and experiment with digital methods for ecological sensing through the use of mobile sensor technologies and techniques developed in our fieldwork. During the workshop participants devised field experiments to generate engagement in eco-sensory methods utilizing distributed sensor technologies such as lidar scanners, AR video, 360 images, air mapping.

The key impact of the workshop was intervening and disrupting the lack of specific training in eco-sensory and non-representational methods currently happening at the post-graduate level in the social sciences, but more especially in education and in projects involving spatial, place-base, ecological, collective relations and problematics. While there is a growth on postgraduate research drawing from philosophical frameworks centered on posthumanism, affect studies, new materialism, new empiricism, science and technology studies, it is not rare to see students proposing research designs that resource conventional qualitative and sensory methods that are human-centered and focused on meaning and representation, which are not commensurate with their philosophical frameworks.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2022
URL https://www.schoolatmospheres.net/blog/the-school-building-exhibition-as-a-site-for-post-graduate-st...