From the collective map to the cultural map: a semiotic analysis of place awareness

THE SUBJECT OF STUDYCopyright 2015 (Ximena Tobi). 13 faculties5 undergraduate studiesSociology / Political Sciences / Social WorkCommunication Sciences / Human Resources25.000 students2.000 lecturers300 employeesOne of these 13:

MAPPING ICONOGRAPHYIcons associated with space issues Copyright 2015 (Ximena Tobi).

More frequented spacesMore action placesPlaces to improve. What to do there?Staying places Quiet placesPlaces promoting community integrationFavourite placesGood surprising places/thingsEmblematic placesMeeting pointsBad surprising places/thingsInstitutional (emotional) containment/supportPotential conflictsPlace associated memories/anecdotesMissing/lack of thingsExplicit conflictsRelevant actions or events

Copyright 2015 (Ximena Tobi). The institutional planning lacks vision to answer to the community needs. PATHWAY 4: MISSING/LACK OF THINGSExample: meeting points for students to work in groups, study or just stay. Finally, they sit on the floor or in an empty classroom until the next lecture begins.

Copyright 2015 (Ximena Tobi). There is a strong change between wings: a transition from the noisy and visually contaminated Santiago del Estero wing to the calm and quiet visually pleasing wings of San Jos and Humberto Primo.PATHWAY 5: ACTION VS QUIET PLACES

CODE: POWER STRUGGLE IN SPACECopyright 2015 (Ximena Tobi). Occupying places shows preeminence (hallways and halls full of signs of political activity groups). It is a concrete and permanent power manifestation in opposition to the volatility of words.

The classroom numbers repetition in the new building wings shows the institutional will to separate instead of unify the space, trying to keep the visual contamination only in the old wing.

CODE: INSTITUTIONAL ABSENCE. THE DOOR IS OPEN BUT THERE IS NO HOSTCopyright 2015 (Ximena Tobi). The Faculty is under-communicated; it is not visible beyond the structure (classrooms), except when brought to life by lecturers and students during classes.

Teaching is the basic Faculty purpose, even though there are many other institutional activities that remain in the dark for most of the public. The building lacks symbolic and physical space to communicate them.

PRELIMINARY CONCLUSIONCultural codesCopyright 2015 (Ximena Tobi). Place awareness & valuationSense of communityChange of habits(Waste separation)Power struggle in space

Institutional absence: the door is open but there is no hostThe building as a space of dispute.

Positive valuation arise only in comparison with previous buildings.Belonging (emotional) ties are stablished among groups of interest.

The institution is just a provider.Challenge.Each actors significant interlocutors should communicate them the institutional awareness messages.

TAKE AWAYSCopyright 2015 (Ximena Tobi). Collective mapping as a user centric methodology to collect voices and viewpoints. The way that individuals interact with places and objects is determined by their symbolic dimensions.

This methodology could be applied to study user interaction in shopping malls, hospitals, neighborhoods

Semiotics complements qualitative research to reveal layers of meaning, working below patterns of action and attitudes.

Acknowledgments / Special thanks to:Daniela Bruno - Communication Sciences Academic Secretary - FSoc UBA 2012-2013.Alejandro RascovnMara Elena BitonteChristian DodaroPablo Hernndez & Gustavo QuintanaDiego DufauVictoria Tatcheva.Ximena Diaz Alarcn & Ramiro FernndezFlorencia Rossi, Karla GngoraSebastin CarenzoMarcelo LotoMauro Oliver

Thank you!Ximena Tobi@[email protected] 2015 (Ximena Tobi). Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd)at

Good morning to everyone. I am very glad of participate in Semiofest again.

In the first part of my presentation, I will talk about the place I studied.

In the second part, I will show some examples of my analysis.

The title that I chose refers to the mapping as a data collection methodology, applied to understanding of the relationship between a particular place and its users; how do they value it and what do they think and feel about it. The case I will show you now is about an indOor space, consIdered as an indOor environment: the Social Sciences Faculty of the University of Buenos Aires, where I studied and then worked for the last twenty years, alongside Four R (4R), a group I created for this purpose.

My interest in mapping arose two years ago when I decided to begin working on the idea of promoting the habit of waste separation at this Faculty.

As you may know waste separation in Latin America is just beginning. It has nothing to do with the situation you have in Europe.Green activism inside the borders of an institution was an interesting sort of lab to understand social values and codes, which operate beneath the act of discarding materials, such as packaging, containers and envelopes.

*Well, how did I use the mapping methodology?

I developed collective mappping workshops, that allowed me to collect first hand material to analyse the cultural codes that determine place awareness and valuation.

One of the conclusions of them was that the ideal university is an institution linked to its members community as well as to its neighborhood.*You might be wondering why I am interested in analysing place awareness and valuation. It is because my hypothesis is that these two dimensions are somehow intertwined to our sense of community; and in the case of my study it is, needed for a change of habits.

Precisely, these symbolic dimensions: place awareness and valuation and sense of community are determined by cultural codes revealed to us using semiotics to analyse the mapped building layouts. As a result, I will present the cultural narratives that arose from the community place perceptions.But before presenting the analysis outputs, I want to show you the institution itself because as Gregory Bateson said: the map is not the territory.

*I would like to show you a very short video of our territory, the building mapped at the workshops.

It belongs to the University of Buenos Aires, a free public university (only for undergraduate studies). Like all the other Argentinean public universities, it has no entrance restrictions for students, theres no admission examination. Any student that has finished secondary school is able to register at any undergraduate studies in the UBA.Another particular feature of public universities in Argentina is the political activities that take part in university everyday life. At the UBA, lecturers and students vote for each Facultys administration every four years.In addition, students, lecturers and employees have unions that represent them as political actors, fighting for better working and studying conditions. As you can see, the university political life is a perfect reflection of society political life.

*The UBA is comprised of 13 faculties.

One of these, the Social Sciences Faculty, was established in 1988.

It includes five undergraduate studies: Social Work, Sociology, Political Sciences, Human Resources and Communication Sciences.

The Social Sciences Facultys community is huge, made up of twenty five thousand students, two thousand lecturers and three hundred employees.

From the three institutional actors I chose to begin studying the lecturers, because they present particular features that can make their sense of belonging to the community and their awareness with regards to the building and its facilities quite difficult

Comparing with other universities in Argentina and the world, lecturers at the Social Science Faculty of UBA are non-full time employees. They come to the university to give classes for two or four hours, one or two times a week, the large majority does not stay at the university.

Of course, to have the whole picture it is necessary to study the three community members.

*Since its foundation, the Social Science Faculty has had two buildings due to the sustained increase of the amount of students, causing serious space problems.

Still today there are two buildings separated by almost 5 kilometers within the Buenos Aires downtown area.

Since the beginning of this year, all of the undergraduate and postgraduate studies are located in the new building (red symbol), which is still under construction, while the administration offices and the central library remain in the old building (green symbol).

*The history of the Facultys building includes many protests among students, lecturers long strikes,

and in 2010 the four months occupation of the buildings by the students demanding for the construction of a single building with enough space for the whole community. *This current context of a single common building (in spanish: Edificio nico) in progress, provided a great opportunity for me to explore the sense of community linked to place awareness & valuation. Subsequently, I had to keep in mind that this analysis will be taking place in the midst of conflict due to the dynamics of politics and power struggles as dimensions of community representations about the building.

Now I will present the semiotic analysis of the mapped Faculty buiding layouts from collective mapping lecturers workshops.*First of all, I want to explain briefly how I designed the collective mapping workshops:They lasted between 2 and 3 hours. During this period, participants used a set of icons as triggers to think about the place that is being mapped, and paste them on the layout.From my former observations of the building dynamics I prepared this mapping iconography:More frequented spacesMore "action" placesPlaces to improve. Places to stayQuiet placesPlaces promoting community integrationFavourite placesPositive surprising places/things Emblematic placesMeeting pointsNegative surprising places or thingsInstitutional (emotional) containment/supportPotential conflictsPlaces associated memories/anecdotesMissing/lack of thingsExplicit conflictsRelevant actions or events

*The placement of the icons on the layout serves as pathways to cultural codes. In this case, the semiotic analysis of the resulting maps comes from the icon dynamics in the layout, but it is not a visual analysis of the icons themselves (although it could be).In contrast the visual discourse functions as the tip of the iceberg. It leads the participants to the mental representation of stories, conflicts, experiences and memories about the place they are mapping, which become the material of my analysis.

Now I will show you some examples of the lecturers mapping:

*Potencial conflict:

Hallways and emergency exit occupied by students political groups stands

*Negative surprising things:

Confusing classroom numbering in the new parts of the building. It is not sequential but repeated in the three wings.

*Places to improve: Entrance open area (conversdromo = talking-drome) could be a meeting point for the Faculty to get in touch with its surrounding neighborhood.

*Missing/lack of things:

The institutional planning lacks vision to answer to the community needs.

For example, the wide hallways could be used to built meeting points for students to work in groups, study or just stay for a while waiting for the next class. Finally, they sit on the floor or in an empty classroom until the next lecture begins.

At the same time, the building space doesnt communicate the institutional life and activities.

There are neither official notice boards, nor printed material available.

*There is a strong change between wings: a transition from the noisy and visually contaminated Santiago del Estero wing to the calm and quiet visually pleasing wings of San Jos and Humberto Primo.All these icons on the map allow me to decipher some lecturers cultural codes and narratives:

*Pathways 1, 2 and 5 guided me to the code Power struggle in space because,

On the one hand, occupying places shows preeminence.

Hallways and halls are full of signs of political activity groups.

It is a concrete and permanent power manifestation in opposition to the volatility of words.

And on the other hand, the classroom numbers repetition in the new building wings shows the institutional will to separate instead of unify the space, trying to keep the visual contamination only in the old wing.

*Pathways 3 and 4 guided me to the code Institutional absence: the door is open but there is no host, because:

The Faculty as an institution is under-communicated; it is not visible beyond the structure of classrooms, an empty shell brought to life by lecturers and students during classes.

Teaching is the basic Faculty purpose, even though there are many other institutional activities (events, projects, research and programs) that remain in the dark for most of the public. The building lacks symbolic and physical space to communicate them.

As you can see, the institutional reality is far from the ideal university, represented by the lecturers as an institution linked to its community.

*In conclusion, the cultural codes I identified: Power struggle in space and Institutional absence show that lecturers represent the building as something quite instrumental that they can not belong to, because it is taken by the political dispute.

Positive valuation arise only in comparison with previous buildings

In this context, belonging ties are stablished among groups of interest (between lecturers, groups of colleagues).

The institution remain just as a provider

Hence, thinking on a change of habits is quite a challenge, but it is time to take the first step:

The institutional awareness messages should be communicated by significant interlocutor for each actor (lecturers, students and employees) in order to increase its relevance. *Finally, I hope that my presentation has shown you the following take aways:First: to understand the collective mapping as a user centric methodology that allow to collect the voices and viewpoints of community members about their own environment (indoor or outdoor)

Second: the relationship between concrete and physical reality (places and objects) and its abstract symbolic dimension, which determine the way that individuals interact with it. In this specific case, the link building - sense of community.

Third: This methodology could be applied to study user interaction in shopping malls, hospitals, neighborhoodsLast but not least: how semiotics can complement qualitative research, where the first can be used to reveal implicit codes many different layers of meaning, working below patterns of action and attitudes.

Knowing these codes is the first stage to design awareness campaign concepts and slogans as well as messages addresing to each institutional actor.**

From the collective map to the cultural map: a semiotic analysis of place awareness

Documents

Transcript of From the collective map to the cultural map: a semiotic analysis of place awareness