MAPPING MOODS FOR FUTURE CITIES

September 15, 2022

Are you interested? Please let us know if you would like to participate in a ‘Mapping Moods for Future Cities’ workshop, an initiative to explore how the maps of our cities might change if we included more affective information like moods.  

 
Wednesday 5th October  
1pm – 3pm   
17-21 Cardigan St, Carlton VIC 3053  
(Spaces Limited, by invitation only) 

This RMIT PlaceLab Event is facilitated by RMIT research professors Larissa Hjorth and Annette Markham. Project is supported by DERC (Digital Ethnography Research Centre) and The Big Anxiety Festival. 


ABOUT THIS EVENT

How do cities make sense of the moods of citizens? Do cities have moods? How can ‘mood’ and the practices of mapping and moodboarding become speculative tools for imagining imagine future designs for resilient cities?    

This two-hour workshop invites participants to discuss and participate in playful experiments to generate collaborative maps of the future city of Melbourne, creating layers of resilience to current dystopian and utopian simplifications of our futures. What mood do we want in our future places? What should the future city feel like, if we want to call it “resilient?” And what role can different people play in placemaking?  

As part of the workshop, participants will discuss how sensory and textural experiences like “mood” become meaningful information for building better futures in times of global crisis.  

HOW THIS EVENT WILL WORK 

  • Facilitators will introduce the idea and premises of maps and their connection to moods.  
  • Participants will work individually with visual and textural materials in the space to visualise their mood map of the city, based on their own experiences and feelings.  
  • Groups will generate a visual and sensory map of the future city, focusing on mood, and then build additional transparent layers of “resilience” to add to their group map.   
  • We’ll finish this workshop by discussing the challenges of the exercises, as well as discuss the value of these “maps” for community building, citizens “resetting” their own cities, and planners using these as tools for facilitating more resilient city futures. 

EVENT DETAILS  

Date and Time 
5 October 2022 
1:00 pm – 3:00 pm   

Location 
RMIT PlaceLab Melbourne 
17-21 Cardigan St, Carlton VIC 3053 

Please send your expression of Interest to participate to:  before Friday 23 September.
 

WORKSHOP FACILITATORS

Professor Larissa Hjorth 

This workshop is facilitated by Larissa Hjorth. She is a socially engaged artist and digital ethnographer with vast leadership experience managing complex stakeholders within and outside the academy. Larissa is Distinguished Professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. 

 
Professor Annette Markham 

Annette Markham is the academic lead on the ‘In the Mood’ Research Project. 
She has extensive experience with conducting participatory workshops as part of arts-based interventions for social change. Annette is Professor within the School of Media and Communication and Co-Director of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre at RMIT University.  

CREDITS

This workshop is part of Professor Annette Markham’s larger research project ‘In The Mood’ focused on moodboarding as a citizen social science method. The project includes three additional workshops in 2022 –in Barcelona, Brunswick, and Ho Chi Minh City.  

The ‘Mapping Moods for Future Cities – Melbourne’ Workshop is presented by RMIT PlaceLab and supported by RMIT’s Digital Ethnography Research Centre. It is aligned with The Big Anxiety Festival 2022 presented by RMIT University. 

PlaceLab – an urban initiative designed to connect community and shape place. 

DERC –a world-leading research hub using human-centred methods to understand how digital transformations impact individuals, relationships, and societies. 

For more information about this initiative or PlaceLab, please contact: