m a k i n g // n a r r a t i v e s

Over the past years HDK - The School of Design and Craft at Gothenburg University have sought out a notion of design beyond the conventional producer/consumer logic where design primarily reads as a product which gains its attraction and value in relation to various markets - giving competitive edge over other similar products. Such a position includes an engagement with discourses, sentiments, intangibles and processes which for various reason are unable and/or unwilling to in a beneficial way commit to these hegemonic circumstances. This shift could be characterised as a shift from problem-solving to creation of meaning you can solve a person problems even if it is not yours (to solve), but meaning - that is something which we create together. In other word - design is here understood in its full reciprocal capacity as a space for dialog. But also of importance here is design as processes which seeks out possible and impossible alternatives - a practice of potentiality - making the unseen seen and the on-thought thinkable and tangible. The notion of making // narratives, although very wide and perhaps dubious, tries to capture a glimpse of this dynamic. Education-wise HDKs commitment to various processes in marginalised areas (from urban development point of view) - such as Backa, Hammarkullen and Angered, marginalised practices (from a design point of view)- such as social services, job-training programs for disabled, and marginalised groups (from a decision making point of view) - such as immigrants, children, young adults and disabled, is an attempt to establish such reciprocal platforms where design practices does not only change how various areas, practices and groups are conceived and perceived but where these areas, practices and groups also change the way design is conceived and perceived. In a nordic perspective and up until recent years, the perspective of children and young adults have been more or less neglected in the field of urban planning and development. Children and young adults (beyond institutionalised settings such as pre-schools and schools) was only accounted for when it came to playgrounds and youth-centres. Today the municipality of

Gothenburg have developed a Tool for Children impact assessment (Verktyg fr Barnkonsekvens analys) or CIA, accounting for the child perspective in a planning context according to a matrix made out of scale on one axis (building & place, neighbourhood, district and city) and aspects on the other (Cohesive city, Interactive play & learning, Everyday life, Identity, Health & Security). The practice of sociotop-mapping, where citizens are asked to give feedback concerning their use of public use according to a pre-set of categories (fishing, bathing, walking, resting, pick-nick, view, boating, green, flowering, heritage, meeting place, water, growing, nature, ball-sports, street-sports, event, parlor games, exercise & play) also in part addresses these issues. Although accounting for the perspective of children and young adults in a meritorious way these are still frameworks developed and established in accordance with the needs of adults and institutions need to acknowledge and represent the world perceived from a non-adult perspective. In the end these frameworks are developed by the adults for the adults with the hope that these frameworks will help adult to remember what it was like to be a child when doing what they already are set to do. Even so they still present an ambition to deal with the perspective of children and young adults as something which is of importance for the city as whole and not only for the playgrounds - laying bare - the tension with the city as conceived by adults and the pre-adult city. In this regard, Palle Nielsens exhibition The Model A Model for a Qualitative Society (Modellen En model fr ett kvalitativtsamhlle) at Moderna Museet in Stockholm 1968, could serve as a counter-example. Where Palle Nielson persuaded Pontus Hultn, the director of Moderna Muset, to open a playground inside the museum. The project was subtitled An exhibition for those who are not playing (En utstllning fr de som inte leker). In the pressrelease you could read the following: The playing is the exhibit. It is only an exhibition because the children play in an art museum. It is only an exhibition for those who dont play. Maybe it will become the model of a society that children want. Maybe children can tell us so much about their world that it also becomes a model for us. Later on the same year it was rebuilt outside Vsters (in the vicinity of Stockholm) to be used by children during the winter and the following spring. Here it was suggested that the perspective of children could be constitutive for society as a whole - that a world built upon the play of children would be more qualitative than that which adult minds have been able to imagine. But the question I would like to dwell on here, in line of Palle Nielssens thinking, is in what way tools and practices such as the CIA and the sociotope maps could be conceived from a pre-adult perspective (can they should they)? Such question, seemingly innocent, proposes that subjects or singular voices, as subjects and voices (and narrative), not as quantitative and statistical accounts and representations, may act directly upon processes (such as city-planning), which have been designed only to act upon quantitative and statistical accounts and representations. Asking the urgent question of how subjects can keep their voice and avoid having their voice representing something other then themselves in smaller as well as larger societal processes. As suggested by Johan berg, drawing on Lefebvre and Bahktin, space and narration are intimately connected and constitutive of each other. Following this the city planner is a author (authority) in the same manner as the author is a conceiver of space and the perception of space.

A notion developed within the master-program Child Culture Design (CCD) at HDK - Playon-the-go - calls to our attention the places in-between, on route from home to school or from the school to a friend or from a friend to football-practice, as spaces which are played in various ways by children and young adults in all ages on a daily basis. These activities can truly be seen as a kind of writing - as instantaneous imaginary inscriptions on our shared space. Consequently the development of play-on-the-go as an integral part of the way we conceive, plan and develop our cities is not so much an issue of design but rather a issues of understanding this kind of writing as design - as writing of space. Asking questions about non-representative design processes and non-representative planning processes, which in the words of Delueze (referring the Kafkas work) could be understood as minor design (processes) or minor planning (processes). Facing these issues, it may be that it is not the methods and tools which fails us, but our language (in the capacity outlined in the earlier passage). As so elegantly demonstrated by Walter Benjamin in his Berlin Childhood around 1900 our cities are profoundly rich reservoir of spaces, imaginations and sensations which only are accounted for by children and young adults and which in a affective ways shapes the way we conceive and perceive our cities as adult. A heritage delayed waiting for being accounted for until the children and young adults have become planners, writers, designers, researchers and so on. Play-on-the-go addresses this issue in a two-folded way firstly in asking questions about urban space as a space of this instant yet prolonged heritage making and secondly in asking question how this instant and yet prolonged heritage making can be intensified by means of design and planning processes. What is proposed here is that Play-on-the-go, given this background and as conceptualized here in relation to city development/children and the dual notion of writing/designing would be a productive and specific platform to explore a wide variety of issues regarding subjectification, narration, city-planning, non-representation, performativity and heritage in relation to design.

Henric Benesch, Gothenburg 130415