For my arts of noticing project I observed two rain gardens on Nostrand and Kosciusko over the course of the semester. I started by first researching the city’s green infrastructure and then visiting eight different rain garden sites in my neighborhood. I chose this site because it was in a spot that wasn’t too busy or too quiet and I liked the idea of being able to compare the dynamics of the two gardens.
I was particularly interested in the following questions from the assignment prompt:
What can you learn from its dynamics? What are the opportunities and challenges it faces?
My approach was to notice, observe and get to know the gardens through many different methods. This included:
Drawing the gardens both on paper in person and digitally drawing on photos of the garden
Taking inventories of the trash and sewer status
Recording sound
Counting the number of people who passed by
Taking measurements such as soil moisture, humidity and temperature
Measuring water level/flow
Taking photos of the garden and elements
3D scanning the garden elements
Using iNaturalist to identify the plant species
Mapping inputs and outputs
You can see my week 7 update here, which includes many examples of these.
In order to bring all of these observations together I decided to make a website that acted as a research journal of sorts. I wanted the visitor to feel as though they were exploring and getting to know the gardens themselves. The visitor hears sound I recorded upon entering the garden page and can navigate the garden by clicking on different hyperlinked spots (indicated by blue circles). The visitor can also compare the gardens using this method of exploration as well. This design was heavily inspired by the hypertext project My Body by Shelley Jackson.
You can visit the site here: https://lydiajessup.github.io/noticing-site/
The code is on Github here: https://github.com/lydiajessup/noticing-site
Inspired by Urban Code: 100 Lessons for Understanding the City, I decided to condense these observations into a set of rain garden codes. Urban Code distills city dynamics into simple movements and relationships in order to better understand them and learn from them. My hope is that these rain garden codes could be a source of insight or point of departure for further research or infrastructure development as the city expands its green infrastructure.
I also printed these as posters using the riso printer (and thanks to Andrew!!) - thinking of them as something that either could serve as a collectable/decoration item or a public poster (similar to the MTA PSA posters).
