AOC with Momentum

LIFT New Parliament

“An important aspect of design is the degree to which the object involves you in its own completion.”  Brian Eno
                       
This statement sets out a process of design, not a designed object. We propose an approach to invention, plus a set of serving suggestions.

The Lift Parliament responds to a shared hunger for alternatives. Different ways of negotiating a relationship with the world. Different conversations, customs and performances. Only by rehearsing such new practices together can we imagine them into being.

For a different kind of engagement, a different kind of space is needed. Not one where people make decisions about others, but where we all make decisions about ourselves. Understanding that true social change is emergent rather than imposed.

We suggest that this space needs to:

• Use its form to challenge institutional conventions, emphasising its otherness, encouraging us to consider familiar spaces anew.
• Employ an adaptive, porous edge to provoke playful questioning of public and private space.
• Offer a deployable roomscape that engages users in curating and changing it.
• Provide many ways to enter, observe and participate, accommodating different practices side-by-side, in real and virtual space, encouraging cross-fertilisation.
• Allow successive participants to leave traces, continually evolving to accommodate and communicate new practices and ideas in a shared story.

In such a Parliament, we could learn a new political literacy together: a shared understanding of how we connect not only in mind but also in space. The Parliament becomes a true public space, in that it emerges from creative practice by users, taken beyond its physical boundary through broader conversations, stories and memories.
A civic moment, not a civic monument.

With that in mind we would approach the participation process with appetite, bringing our suggested ingredients to the table, but understanding ourselves as co-narrators, not sole creators. 

Working with participants, we propose designing inside-out, starting with exploration of the Parliament’s philosophies and practices. Teasing out codes, conventions and ways of doing and communicating through a story-based methodology: sharing memories and experiences, and imagining the Parliament’s future histories and founding myths. Only from there would we move to considerations of form, using relevant site-expeditions as inspiration.

As a primary tool we propose the preparation of a ‘spatial constitution.’ This diagrammatic document would be developed cumulatively and collaboratively, working with participants to write, draw and paint decisions and wishes from each session, re-working as necessary. In its final form, this artwork will act as a poetic yet clear reference for final designs, adding accountability to the process, while also being a beautiful artefact and founding document of the Parliament itself.

 “A building is not something you finish. A building is something you start.”
Stewart Brand