Marco legal de la capacitación

In outline, the workshop activities and representation options were devised in response to the following objectives:

§ Elicit meanings of ‘sustainable food’ and ‘sustainable food practices’ as foundational to the analysis of the design responses generated within the workshops;

§ Map participants’ food provisioning habits and consider these in relation to the home-based food production approaches documented in Phase 2;

§ Identify any dilemmas faced by participants in enacting their

commitment to sustainable food practices, with an emphasis on spatial and material factors; and

§ Enable participants to represent speculative and idealised

arrangements of domestic space to better facilitate their sustainable food practices.

Equally, the workshops offered participants the opportunity for enjoyable knowledge sharing and learning, in line with my value for reciprocity. The approach was contingent upon participants’ firsthand experience of the practices of growing and producing food, integral to related practices such as gardening for biodiversity and land remediation, and water and energy

harvesting and cycling. The expectation was for this experiential and embodied knowledge to be encoded into participants’ design responses. Further,

workshop attendance de-situated participants from their own home-garden context, opening the possibility for their contributions to integrate the diverse, brainstorming ideas of group exchange.

This workshop approach was underpinned by multiple theory-practice

conjoining strategies, again intersecting with participatory resilience-building strategies. The first is Toni Robertson and Jesper Simonsen’s practice-focused framing of participatory design, echoing my own intent for the workshops: “When different voices are heard, understood and heeded in a design process, the results are more likely to be flexible and robust in use, accessible to more people, more easily appropriated into changing situations, and more adaptable to these situations over time” (2012, p. 6). In a second strategy, the facilitator and I were aware of emulating approaches from professional practice intended to foster enhanced client dialogue and input into projects. These included adapting to the language and terminology used by participants, welcoming

117

participants’ meaningful examples and stories into the workshop, and being flexible with the activities and representation options, as I discuss below.

In a third theory-practice conjoining strategy, the facilitator and I also

recognised representation as a factor crucial to the success of the workshop approach. The representations made by participants – symbolic images, maps, lists, diagrams and sketches – were viewed as artefacts embedding existing knowledge and practice, but also positing potentially new, ‘what-might-be’ scenarios. This generative, re-visioning process evokes once more the inquiry- through-design approaches described by Armstrong (2000), Downton (2003) and Franz (2000, 2007). Transposed to this study, the artefacts emerging from the workshop were subject to reflection, inter-textual readings and further synthesis akin to these authors’ studio-based examples of graduate student work.

The informal studio of the workshop interrogated different aspects of the overarching question, and offered multiple, playful modes of expression to encourage ease of representation for participants, enlivened by their

annotations and spoken dialogue. Aware that the challenge posed by the task of representation itself might de-focus the substantive questions core to the activities, I pitched the eventual tasks relative to observations noted in the Phase 2 visits. A proportion of participants displayed spatial diagrams of their gardens, including planting layouts and bed rotations they had already created. Others made reference to their use of such diagrams in books, magazines and online resources, indicating considerable visual and spatial literacy. Prospective participants were also assured in the invitation that drawing skills were not required. The expressive and detailed outcomes included in Chapter 6, suggest that the workshops fostered relaxed and fluid engagement by participants.

Forms of data and analytical approach

As suggested by the discussion of representation modes above, the forms of data generated in the workshops were diverse. In addition, the dialogue was captured via audio recording, I made notes during activities, and wrote a

reflective account after each workshop’s de-brief discussion with the facilitator. I outline in Chapter 6 how the workshop approach evolved as a result of the

reflective data generated. Given that I considered participants’ design

representations as both artefacts for interpretation and for further synthesis and development via my design iterations, the analysis became two-pronged.

Carrying through my interest in issues associated with urban form, housing types, density and tenure from Phase 2, I was first keen to capture transferable

particularities related to these factors within the design representations. In this sense, I did not set out to aggregate or conflate participants’ responses and speculations for the primary purpose of generalising, as is common in interpretive inquiry. The inter-textual visual methods I adopted in Phase 1, detailed in Section 4.3, were again useful in this process and were richly augmented by having been present and engaged in each workshop.

The second prong of the analysis employed brief writing as an analytical tool, and a further means of generating and representing future scenarios.

Conceptually, the resultant meta-brief was spurred by discussion of contrasting approaches to the design brief in professional practice by Karen Franck and Theresa von Sommeruga Howard (2010), in tandem with the pattern language devised by Alexander, Ishikawa and Silverstein (1977). The primary appeal of the pattern language is its ability to capture the particularities of differing design contexts understood as social contexts, at interconnecting scales. The

workshop design representations were therefore discussed according to issues of scale, housing types and norms, dwelling layout and the kitchen-garden interface, rippling out to broader, relevant social considerations. This discussion then informed the formulation of the meta-brief for ‘food axis design patterns’ serving as the conclusion to Chapter 6, and directing my own design iterations in Chapter 7.