Uniform

Msheireb under the spotlight

By Clare Melhuish

I’m a Research Associate at The Open University in Geography, on a project called ‘Architectural Atmospheres’ with Gillian Rose (OU) and Monica Degen (Brunel University), and I have been studying Uniform’s CG team at work.

It’s part of our investigation into how digital visualisation technology is affecting the way that architecture is designed, produced, and emerges ‘on the ground’, so to speak. We’ve been following the Msheireb Downtown redevelopment project in Doha, Qatar, as our case study – a £3.5 billion, 31 hectare that will transform the architectural centre of the city.

The research has taken me round a number of architectural offices in London which have been involved in the project for the last few years – including Gensler, who commissioned Uniform to work on visualisations for the scheme in phases 2 and 3.

Hence my trip to Liverpool – missing out on the brief three-day heatwave in London! But I was very happy to have the opportunity to observe and gain a better understanding of the processes involved in creating CG images, and enjoy the creative ambience of the office. The research method we are using is ethnography – fieldwork involving observation, documentation and description of people in social settings, which became standard practice in anthropology from the early 20^th century.

Interestingly, it’s also more recently become a bit of a buzzword in design fields such as product design (UCD) and Human Computer Interaction research; ‘ethnographic services’, researching users’ experiences, are quite often offered now by commercial design consultancies as a ‘value added’ feature of their work. Social science researchers tend to see this as a bit lightweight, but the truth is that most ethnographic research today is not the long-term, immersive experience it once was.

From our point of view, this method of working is useful to try and understand how digital visualisation tools and technologies are actually being used by architects and visualisers, working closely together, to project new built environments which in turn will shape the way people inhabit and experience contemporary cities.

The Doha project was very interesting to us because it’s a large-scale mixed-use development of a sort which doesn’t exist in the Gulf region at the moment. It sets a new benchmark compared to the eclectic excesses of ‘Dubaisation’, and has involved a heavy reliance on CG images, even before any design work had actually been done, to ‘tell the story’ of what this place is going to be like, and generate public engagement.

By spending time in the different offices involved in the production of these images, we are gradually building up a picture of how designers and visualisers represent the environments of the future, and evoke ideas about the social experience they will host. From October we will start collating and analysing our data, and preparing a number of outputs – some academic papers, and a combined conference and exhibition scheduled for October 2013. For further information, look at our webpage, or contact me at clare.melhuish@open.ac.uk.

So many thanks indeed to you all for putting up with my presence in your midst – especially the very tolerant and welcoming CG team! I hope my foray into the world of 3DS Max, with my camera and questions, didn’t disturb you too much, and I look forward to updating you with our progress in due course.

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