My Take On......Informal Urban Practices "Through the various assignments so far, I have become more aware of the space and context associated with the products I one day want to design. Through the exploration of people, spaces and practices, products can be designed that serve their purpose with greater success".Project 1: A Look at Informal Urban Practices Analysing an informal urban practice on a secondary research basis helped me in understanding what ‘informal’ meant in regards to urban practices. Looking over our findings as a class and discussing them with classmates gave me a different perspec-tive of what we were styding and heightened my curiosity.

Project 2: Exploration Stepping out of the confines of the classroom allowed me to relax a lot more and take my time when trying to spot informal urban practices. Albert park wasn’t the most interesting of suburbs, and was quite boring to say the least, but despite the relaxed lifestyle that people in the community follow, the area still had much to offer. I was about to think about classroom examples previously addressed and spot examples of them much easier than expected.

Project 3: Intervention The third project undertaken forced me to step out of my comfort zone and ana-lyse an informal practice first hand. Two separate projects were undertaken in our group, both with great success. Public twister was our first experiment which immedi-ately attracted interest but the shy nature of many people stopped many from partici-pating. The second experiment undertaken was public hop scotch, where we drew hop scotch squares and recorded how many people hopped along the squares as they walked by.

Project 4: Occupation Collingwood was the site of our next set of experiments where we asked a set list of questions to locals trying to understand more about informal urban practices in the area. Luckily, we had immediate success and the first person we spoke to gave us insight into many aspects of behind the scenes happenings in the suburb regard-ing homelessness, alcoholism, and drug use. Travelling to the suburb and performing the experiment at different times proved to be meaningless do to the similar results achieved.

Project 5: Market Trading This project in particular forces us to combine all the assignments and analyse key points and areas of interest that we felt we could focus on. Through the trading of cards and discussion of interests, we were able to speculate on what we wanted to focus on for our final assignment and seek people with other interests to work along-side us.

Oscar langley s3231372