Studio Projects
The Practice of Reflection
The Reflective Practitioner
- Donald Schon sees a "core of artistry" in the practice of those
professionals recognized as unusually gifted, be they designers,
musicians, lawyers, or doctors: "Artistry is an exercise of intelligence,
a kind of knowing...There are an art of problem framing, an art of
implementation, and an art of improvisation." (Schon, Educating the
Reflective Practitioner, p. 13)
- At the heart of this artistry is the ability to
"reflect-in-action," "to reshape what we are doing while we are doing it"
to experiment and reflect upon the results, especially those which were
unintended.
- Reflection-in-action is a means of going beyond the application
of known rules to the structuring of situations and actions.
- Self evaluation--a critical appreciation for one's own strengths
and weaknesses, interests and values--and peer review--constructive
critique of other's approaches to a problem--are essential skills for
reflective practice. Developing these abilities has been a major
objective of this course.
The Studio as Practicum
- The studio explored the contribution of landscape architects to
urban design from strategic landscape planning to detailed design.
Projects spanned these scales and concerns. Design is not a linear
process (from site analysis to site plan, to design of subareas, to
selection of materials and design of details), but rather a process of
continual, fluent movement among diverse scales and concerns. This
approach underlay the organization of the course.
- Collectively, the projects spanned a range of roles played by
landscape architects in professional practice: landscape planning,
design, and management; diagnosis of problems and identification of
opportunities; program development; public education; peer review.
- The studio confronted a series of problems for which there are no
singular, right answers; problems, furthermore, where conventional
practice has failed to find successful solutions. The most successful
designs reframed the problem, invented modes of implementation, and
improvised with materials, processes, forms, functions, and agents at hand.
Program
- The overarching task uniting all our projects this semster was
the design of an environmental education program where the "classroom" is
an entire neighborhood, where learning, doing, and living are one.
- The current task is a review, reflection, and re-presentation of
the entire semester's work.
- Another important part of this task is assessment of your own
strengths and weaknesses and sense of direction for the future.
- The product will be a CD-ROM representing the collective work of
the studio which will be sent out to reviewers of your choice.
Requirements
- Your final website must contain the following: a
selective presentation of your work from each of the following projects:
Cultivating the Urban Forest
(September 30-October 28); Restoring and Revealing Urban Waters (October
30-December 5).
- Your work for Describing the Place (September 16-30) will be
incorporated, as it is now, into the common website, with credits.
- Your work for Landscape, Community, and Education may be
incorporated into your own website, but the studio as a whole will be
responsible for producing a collective presentation, on the web, of work
done in SMS classes. We will discuss the nature of and responsibility
for this presentation at our meeting on December 6.
- Each person must assume his/her fair share of other tasks
necessary to produce and distribute the CD-ROM, as determined by the studio.
- Complete a self evaluation reflecting on the semester as a whole
(see below). You may send this form digitally or turn in it in on
paper. Your self evaluation will serve as the basis for discussion of
your progress over the course of the semester with AWS.
- Complete an evaluation of the studio. You may send the form digitally to AWS or
turn in it in on paper to Cristen. This must be completed as your final
requirement for the course! If turned into Cristen, it will not be read
until after final grades for the course are submitted.
Protocol
- Your website must provide for navigation back to the common
website (we will discuss this as a group).
- In order to make your CD-ROM final project compatible with as many computers as possible, it will be necessary for many of you to change slightly the way you have been working on your WWW sites. You will need to modify your previous work and produce all new work according the following parameters:
- ALL files must be named according to the old MS-DOS format of 8+3. This means, names must be 8 characters or less with a 3 character extension separated by a period (.) HTML files must be called FILE.HTM. JPEG files must be called FILE.JPG GIF files must be called FILE.GIF.
- You may only use the alphabet and numbers in the names. No punctuation marks (this includes spaces) may be used in the file name except the underline character (_) and the single period separating the 8 character name from the three character extension. No dashes, colons, commas, semicolons, tildes, carats, asterisks, parantheses or brackets.
- Your Personal home page must be called index.htm and your LARP 601 studio work must be called gallery.htm. With the exception of dropping the 'l', You have been asked to do this repeatedly since the beginning of the semester. Those of you who have not fixed this, please do so.
- You may produce and check all work on a local machine. You do not need to upload the final product to your web sites. (Though this will still be necessary for the final review of your Water Garden/Detention Pond) This should alleviate the size issue.
- The total project must be less than 650MB. As you have all been working within 3-4MB limits, this may seem like a lot, but you should continue to be conservative in terms of image size and file size. Only make images as big as they need to be.
- Since most recipients of your CD-ROM will probably not have the latest and greatest web browser, please write your HTML for Netscape Navigator version 2.0 as this is generally available to most people today. Do not use Background Sounds, QTVR, Java apps (Javascript is OK) or tags that only work for Microsoft Internet Explorer.
- Do not embed in your own pages resources that are being accessed remotely (like images, page counters, banners from the Thai Club, CGI and perl scripts, etc.) as there is no guarantee that the user will be on-line when they use this. In other words, any images and other resources/effects you have on your page, should be your own. For example, you should not have any image tags that look like:
img src=http://www.disneyland.com/mickey/icon.gif If you want the image of Mickey Mouse on your web site, you need to copy it over and have it in hand. (This is a bad example in terms of copyright law. It is simply an illustration)
On the other hand, you should feel free to link to external web sites, as some of you have been doing, as long as this doesn't interfere with the loading and display of your own pages.
- In line with #7, those of you still using the icon bar from the LARP 601 course site, will need to change the URL path for each of the icons. These changes will be posted as the structure of the CD-ROM becomes more clear.
- Other common protocol will be spelled out as needed.
Reading
Donald Schon, The Reflective Practitioner. (Basic Books, 1984), a study of
professional practice as artistry involving 'reflection-in-action.'
Skills
- Web authoring: presenting yourself and your ideas.
- Reflective practice: self-evaluation; peer review.
- Producing a CD-ROM.
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Last Update: 8 January 1997
