ExplorationTwo Twelve Day Outing
Photo Courtesy of Steve Hamilton.
Thinking outside the box about wayfinding design is a part of our expertise here at Two Twelve. A few times a year, Two Twelve holds a celebration of wayfinding where we all get out of the office, let down our hair (so to speak), and engage with what we do a little differently. In the past, the office has gone bike-riding through Governor’s Island and attended a Mets game; this year’s outing was kept a secret from most of the office. The most anyone knew was that we were meeting in a brick rehearsal space in Gowanus… Nikki and Paola, two of our administrative staff, chime in on the day!
Nikki: We all steadily arrived at Sky Gallery, a space that only one of us had been to before. No one really knew what to expect, an effect that was planned by the “creative team” of the day, headed up by artist Steve Hamilton. We could all surmise that it would be somehow related to what we do at Two Twelve, but we didn’t know how, or what we’d be doing. It soon became apparent that we would be working with a choreographer who would be doing some movement exercises with us, meant to pose questions related to wayfinding, how bodies navigate space, and how this changes as society becomes more digitized every day.
Photo Courtesy of Steve Hamilton.The first and most immediate question many of us had to ask ourselves was, how do we navigate a place with people swirling all around us? However, the question wasn’t posed directly. Instead, we danced our way through the problem. New York-based choreographer Jodi Melnick had us traverse the room, over and over again, playing with different speeds, all the while music was being improvised in the background to reflect the different moods of the wayfinder – calm, slow, fast and excited, hurried and stressed, discordant. Later, Jodi added the complexity of attaching what were, in effect, very large, solid hoop skirts to our bodies: navigating the space looked and felt very different with the addition of a prop that made the body wider, and perhaps a bit unwieldy and unexpected. How do we, in our bodies with all their difference, navigate space and how does the addition of other limbs affect this? Some folks thrived with the avatars, spinning and twirling through the crowd with aplomb, and others were weighted down, their movements uncoordinated and bumbling.
Photo Courtesy of Steve Hamilton.
Another thing I thought interesting was how each person handled the exercise – after all, it’s not every day that you’re asked to move boldly across a bare room in full, exuberant view -- quite a difference from sitting at our desks all day! Seeing how everyone managed to engage in this activity, and all the feelings and nerves this brought up, was just as fascinating as the structure of the activity itself. I myself felt a little inhibited at first, but as more information flooded the room, like the music and props, I found that I just had to let go and live in the situation.
Photo Courtesy of Steve Hamilton.
Paola: After lunch, we regrouped inside the gallery space. Steve and his team split us up into groups of four or five, appointing the newest members of the company as team leaders and building from there. Each team sat around a small table and awaited instructions, cautiously eyeing a table brimming with craft supplies in the center of the room.
We were given a series of prompts, one-sentence descriptions of a theoretical future world. Our task was to weave together these environmental, political, and economic scenarios and create a cohesive story about this future world. We then had to design an artifact, an object that had been brought back to this time by someone who had traveled forward in time and experienced our future world. As soon as we received these instructions there was a mad dash for the supply table, with team members grabbing whatever they could get their hands on to construct their artifacts. Group tables were littered with pipe cleaners, metal bits, and scraps of fabric as we set to work.
My team imagined a world in which the ozone layer had been replenished and much of the federal highway land had been reclaimed for farming. Women constituted 70% of the workforce, inventing technologies to make farming more effective and efficient, while men toiled away in the fields. As one of our prompts stipulated that most objects had become sentient, we created a device called “Gaia,” which collects data on plants’ health and adjusts water and other factors accordingly. The Gaia is a small, airborne object, which flies over the fields and uses five separate feelers to determine temperature, humidity, sunlight, water levels, and growth rate. Other teams created objects such as mats for meeting and dialogue, and a hologram machine for transporting people and objects.
Gaia. Photo Courtesy of Steve Hamilton
NP & PS: Overall, this exercise helped us escape the practical constraints of designing in the everyday world by pushing us into a future where conditions were different. It is helpful to keep this mode of thinking when we create in every day life, not allowing ourselves to get bogged down by restrictions and concerns. Between dancing in the morning and designing futuristic inventions in the afternoon, 212 Day helped us think about bodies and space, and how they intersect.
