MAPPING META PORTRAIT
a socially engaged cultural probe

By
Elisa Yon
B.Arch, University of Waterloo, 2003

A THESIS ESSAY SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE
REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF APPLIED ART
in
Media Arts

EMILY CARR UNIVERSITY OF ART + DESIGN
2012

© Elisa Yon, 2012

Mapping Meta Portrait

ii

Abstract This thesis investigates a process-based socially engaged practice from the
perspective of a designer and architect by training. It outlines a trajectory of
research as explored through two projects, Diary (1976-2009) and the
Meta Portrait. Using a methodology underpinned by empathetic design
thinking (Gaver, Sanders, Brown) and animated by an ethnographic and
reflexive approach to site-oriented (Green, Hiller) and socially engaged art
practice (Chang, Kimbell), this thesis focuses on the Meta Portrait, as
experienced through a virtual and material-based project. The work aims to
reveal unique insights into the cultural, social, and political layers that shape
an individual’s identity, and ultimately a place, relative to time and space
(Massey).
Meta Portrait is a site-oriented method of inquiry into the social fabric of
Emily Carr University. The project utilizes a visual and textual ethnographic
tool in the form of a cultural probe to engage a small cross section of the
university community, including myself as a participant observer. The work
explores the possibilities for a type of place-specific socially engaged
interdisciplinary practice, one with the capacity to understand individuals,
communities, or cities through temporal and impermanent interventions
within the public realm.
The possibilities for socially engaged cultural probes within an interdisciplinary
social practice may lead to new ways of thinking about how, as artists and
designers, we may begin to engage and/or catalyze an individual or
collective agency within a place-specific framework.

Mapping Meta Portrait

iii

Table of Contents
Abstract

ii

Table of Contents

iii

List of Illustrations

iv

Acknowledgements

vi

1. Introduction
Motivations1
Background2
	
2. Hybrid Methodology
Situating the Praxis
Meta Portrait as Cultural Probe

11
18

3. Situating Site and Mapping Place
Contextualizing Site and Place
Mapping a Living Archive

20
29

4. Mapping Meta Portrait
Cultural Probe in Action
Portrait Observations
Mapping Trajectories and Reflections

31
34
50

Reference List

54

Appendix I
Research Ethics Board (REB) Primary and Secondary
Consent Forms. Dated 21 March, 2011

58

Appendix II
Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
Application for Ethics Approval Letter for Meta Portrait

59

Appendix III
Emily Carr University of Art + Design
Approved Research Ethics Board Final Completion Letter

60

Mapping Meta Portrait

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List of Illustrations

Figure 1.		

Gathering Space. Venice Biennale. 2008

1

Figure 2.		

PechaKucha Experiments: Portrait as Place

3

Figure 3.		

PechaKucha Experiments: Portrait as Landscape

3

Figure 4.		

Hybrid Socially Engaged Design Practice: Venn Diagram

6

Figure 5.		

Diary (1976-2009). Detail 2011.

7

Figure 6.		

Diary (1976-2009). Installation. 2011. 

7

Figure 7.		

Sketch of Childhood Home by N.Chaland. 2010.

9

Figure 8.		

Renovated Couch House Interior. 2011.

9

Figure 9.		

Contextual Timeline: Participatory/Critical Design

12

Figure 10.

Contextual Timeline: Situating Meta Portrait

15

Figure 11.

Contextual Timeline: Socially Engaged Practice/Theory

15

Figure 12.

Suzanne Lacy’s Audience Model within Social Practices

16

Figure 13.

Contextual Timeline: Situating Meta Portrait (Art+Design)

17

Figure 14.

Presence Project. Toolkits. Gaver/Dunne/Pacenti. 

18

Figure 15.

R.Green. Scenes from a Group Show. Installation. 

20

Figure 16.

R.Green. Scenes froom a Group Show. Installation. 

21

Figure 17.

L.Kimbell. Audit. Example Questionnaire. 2002.

23

Figure 18.

L.Kimbell. Audit. Example Graphic Visualization. 2002.

24

Figure 19.

C. Chang. Before I Die. Detail of Chalkboards. 2011.

26

Figure 20.

C. Chang. Before I Die. Installation. 2011.

26

Mapping Meta Portrait

v

List of Illustrations (cont’d)
Figure 21.

C. Chang. Before I Die. Do-It-Yourself Toolkit. 2011.

27

Figure 22.

Meta Portrait. Participant Model Visualization. 

31

Figure 23.

Meta Portrait. Example of Image/Text Cards. (L.Daniels). 

33

Figure 24.

Meta Portrait. Image Still. R.Wong Work Session. 

34

Figure 25.

Meta Portrait. R.Wong. Image Cards. (F.Wah/P.Wong). 

35

Figure 26.

Meta Portrait. Portrait of H. May. Image Cards. (R.Baumann)

36

Figure 27.

Meta Portrait. S. Rodrigues/E.Yon. Image Cards. 

39

Figure 28.

Meta Portrait. J.Birch. Image Cards. Image Still. 

43

Figure 29.

Meta Portrait. J.Birch. Mapping Exercise Visualization.

44

Figure 30.

Meta Portrait Kapsul. Screen Capture.

45

Figure 31.

Meta Portrait Kapsul. Image & Text Presentation

46

Figure 32.

Meta Portrait Keys.

48

Figure 33.

Meta Portrait Keys as Evocative Object

48

Figure 24.

Meta Portrait Kapsul on Mobile Phone

49



Mapping Meta Portrait

vi

Acknowledgements This thesis owes much gratitude to Heidi May, Rita Wong, Sadira Rodrigues,
Jesse Birch, Haig Armen, Alexandra Samuel and all of the friends, colleagues,
and family members who participated in the Meta Portrait. I would like to
thank Karolle Wall, Randy L. Cutler, Deborah Shackleton, and Fiona Bowie
for all of their support and guidance throughout the theory, practice, and
writing of this thesis. I am grateful to my supervisor Cameron Cartiere for her
vision, wisdom, and generous encouragements.

I am thankful for the support of my cohorts: Sean Arden, Vanessa Arnold,
Myron Campbell, Cheryl Carpenter, Elisa Ferrari, Kristina Friedrich, Patricia
Huijnen, Stephanie Jonsson, Amanda Leppi, Ana Mejia, Luke Parnell,
Marten Sims, Katherine Soucie, Adam Stenhouse, David Vaisbord, and
Karen Whistler.

A special thanks to Nelly Yong, Lois Klassen, Carl Wiebe, and Ruby for
constantly reminding me that all you need is love.

Mapping Meta Portrait

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1. Introduction

Motivations My experience as the lead designer of an architectural installation called The
Gathering Space (Figure 1), at the 2008 Venice Biennale for Architecture
left me with many questions concerning the role of public art within the
urban realm. The Gathering Space was a large sculptural winding staircase
that sat proudly in a public square overlooking the Grand Canal in Venice.
During the course of the exhibition I observed hundreds of visitors as they
performed the ritual of climbing, standing, viewing and then sitting on the
steps, using the stair as an object, - a place to rest, gather, and socialize.
As a young architect by training, being able to participate in a prestigious
international architecture exhibition was a humbling experience, and I was
Figure 1.The Gathering Space.
Venice Biennale Architecture
Venice, Italy. 2008.
Photo: Elisa Yon. Used by
Permission of the artist

reminded that architecture is, amongst other things, about designing for
social engagement.

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1. Introduction

Background In 2010, on my return to Canada from a professional architecture practice
in the UK, I embarked on a project to explore the possibility of a creative
practice outside of architecture. I began co-organizing a social networking
event for creative disciplines called PechaKucha Night™, initially conceived
in 2003 by Tokyo based architects, Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham. The
architects came up with the idea after having noticed the lack of opportunities
for young designers and other emerging creative practitioners, to show or
share their work. As a response, they designed an event revolving around
a unique presentation format based on 20 images for 20 seconds each.
A typical evening would have between 12-16 presenters from a variety of
different disciplines. There are now over 450 PechaKucha Night™ events
globally and similar types of social networking events are emerging locally,
such as TEDx Talks, Vancouver Design Nerd Jams, and Vancouver’s Draw
by Night.1
My experience with co-organizing a series of PechaKucha Night™ events
introduced me, in a unique way, to site-oriented curatorial and social practice.
The collaborative relationship between my co-organizers and I (a general
manager of a local arts venue, and an artistic director of a communication
design studio) was the first time I had worked with professionals outside
of my own discipline. As a group our aim was to stay true to the original
concept of the event, whilst still being able to respond to the local character
and emerging creative trends within the community.
1 TEDx Talks is a local extension of the larger TED Talk events (est.1984) to bring
together professionals from the Technology, Entertainment, and Design industries.
Vancouver Nerd Jams engages a diverse range of professionals for community
based design projects. Draw by Night Vancouver is a social networking event
revolving around the creative practice of drawing, inviting open collaboration and
community engagement.

Mapping Meta Portrait

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1. Introduction

Figure 2. PechaKucha
Experiments. Portrait as Place.
Photo: Ayrie Cunliffe. Used by
permission of the photographer.

During my first week of the Master of Applied Art program at Emily Carr
University of Art + Design in 2010, incoming graduate students were
Figure 3. PechaKucha
Experiments. Portrait as
landscape. Photo: Amy Fong.
Used by permission of
photographer.

invited to give a PechaKucha Night™ presentation as a way to introduce
ourselves to our faculty and fellow students. For a portion of my twenty
images I decided to invite others to send me an image that they thought best
described my character and/or relationship to me -- specifically requesting
digital images that were not a direct representation of me.
I challenged friends and colleagues to think metaphorically about their choice
of image. Digital photographs of landscapes, objects, places, and animals
were e-mailed back to me along with short descriptive texts explaining their
choice of image (see Figures 2 and 3). The exercise of eliciting metaphoric
portraits of myself from friends and colleagues surprisingly triggered a
reflexive learning process in which I was able to view myself through a
different lens. I had an immediate reaction to chronologically order the
returned images, hoping that they would reveal a narrative. The images
easily brought back memories of the places, experiences, and events I had

Mapping Meta Portrait

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1. Introduction

shared with these individuals, along with a clear sense of how much I had
changed in character, personal interests, and life ambitions. This experience
led me to question the possibilities for a type of reflexive method of inquiry -one that would invite individuals to reflect on past and present relationships
for the purposes of potentially revealing unique insights into their own
identities.
My curiosity led me to expand the parameters of the investigation with
a second experiment. I invited an arts administrator and faculty member
from Emily Carr University to solicit one digital image and one paragraph
from twenty individuals within their respective social networks. Similar
reflexive experiences resulted. However, I was intrigued to note the
differences in rationale my collaborators used in choosing their respective
twenty participants -- one participant invited a broad range individuals that
included family, friends, ex-girlfriends, colleagues, and employees. The other
participant lived her life very much on-line and in virtual social networking
platforms. This participant decided to solicit images both from her on-line
and real-life community, in some cases receiving responses from individuals
she had never met in person. This stage in the process is significant as it is
the first point in which the individual is forced to think about whom to request
an image from, thus setting the tone and shaping the framework in which a
collective representation can evolve.
These initial experiments provided the basis for the Meta Portrait, a siteoriented method of inquiry into the social fabric of Emily Carr University. The
project utilizes a visual and textual ethnographic tool in the form of a cultural
probe to engage a small cross section of the university community, including

Mapping Meta Portrait

5

1. Introduction

myself as a participant observer.2 The work explores the possibilities for a
type of place-specific social practice, one with the capacity to reveal unique
insights into the lived experiences of individuals, communities, and/or cities
through temporal and impermanent interventions within the public realm.
In the early stages of my research I was eager to absorb the current
discourses in design and public art practices. I embarked on a literature
review that introduced me to the artists and designers who have expanded
the fields of public art and critical design practices. They include artists
and designers such as, Suzanne Lacy, Mark Dion, Renée Green, Susan
Hiller, Dunne & Raby, Bruno Munari and Charles & Ray Eames. At the
same time I was influenced by contemporary social practice curators and
art theorists such as Mary Jane Jacob, Claire Doherty, Claire Bishop, and
leading human centred design practitioners such as Liz Sanders and Tim
Brown. As I engaged in a series of mind mapping exercises, key terms and
common themes began to emerge for me. Participation, collaboration, and
ethnographic fieldwork are all common themes in pre-design research and
contemporary socially engaged public art practice. This observation made
me question the possibilities for a type of hybrid social practice, (illustrated
as a Venn diagram in Figure 4). Can a socially engaged design practice
exist? And if so, what would the opportunities for this type of practice be?
and how does one think about the audience within this model of practice?

2 In pre-design research methods, designers such as Bill Gaver, Liz Sanders, and
other innovation and design consultancies are increasingly utilizing cultural probes
in the form of toolkits to elicit information about people, environments, and their
daily experiences during the generative stages of a participatory design process.
A cultural probe may include visual and textual ethnographic tools such as: diary
documentation kits, disposable cameras, and mapping exercises.

Mapping Meta Portrait

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6

1. Introduction

Figure 4.
A Hybrid Social Practice
shown as a Venn diagram,
incorporating design thinking,
socially engaged practice, and
the concept of the audience

Armed with an array of questions, new terms, and key concepts surrounding
empathetic design and site-oriented ethnographic art practice I returned
to an earlier project I started in 2009 which utilized a visual method of
ethnographic inquiry. The Diary piece evolved from a curiosity about my
past and present relationship to inhabited spaces. I challenged myself to
draw the floor plans of all the houses and apartments I have ever lived in
from memory. Surprisingly, the exercise triggered narratives and anecdotes
of the people, relationships, and experiences associated with those places.
Rather than let those peripheral memories disappear into the back my
mind I decided to record them by writing small notes in the margins of
the drawings. Upon revisiting the project in 2010, I produced a complete
set of fifteen drawings, with consideration given to composition, graphic
architectural drafting standards, and placement of handwritten texts. The
images in Figures 5 and 6 show a detail and installation view of the piece.

Mapping Meta Portrait

1. Introduction

Figure 5. Diary.(1976-2009)
Detail, 2010. (Glasgow Flat).
Pen on Sketch Paper.
dimensions variable. Photo:
Elisa Ferrari. Used by
permission of the photographer.

Figure 6. Diary.(1976-2009).
Installation, 2010.
Pen on Sketch Paper.
dimensions variable.
Photo: Elisa Ferrari. Used by
permission of the photographer.

7

Mapping Meta Portrait

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1. Introduction

The reflexive nature of the Diary piece triggered my curiosity in its potential
as a tool to engage clients in a participatory design process within the
generative stages of designing a space or a building.
During the summer of 2010, I was asked by an acquaintance to provide
some advice on the renovation of a new home she and her husband had just
acquired. We met informally to discuss her plans, budget, and initial ideas
to make limited alterations to the layout. Out of curiousity, and as a way to
understand her experience and relationship to domestic spaces I invited her
to draw the floor plans of her childhood home, as shown in Figure 7. The
drawing exercise allowed me to identify the experiences and features of the
house she most associated with during her formative years, and enabled
me to engage in a series of preliminary layout sketches. I parted ways with
her after our initial meeting, leaving her with a few sketches. A few months
later she contacted me via a social networking platform, tagging me in a
photograph of her newly renovated open-plan kitchen and living space.
She expressed her appreciation for our initial conversations which were
instrumental to their approach in envisioning their new home. The image in
Figure 8 shows a new exterior window and door screen that connects the
new living space to the garden -- a feature I had suggested after listening to
her speak fondly of the natural landscape surrounding her childhood home.

Mapping Meta Portrait

1. Introduction

Figure 7. Sketch by Nicole
Chaland of childhood home.
2010. Used by permission of
the author.

Figure 8. Coach house interior
showing new window and door
screen.Victoria, BC. 2011.
Photo: Nicole Chaland. Used by
permission of the photographer.

9

Mapping Meta Portrait

10

1. Introduction

Diary (1976-2009) and its applied possibilities formed the basis for the
Meta Portrait. In both the PechaKucha experiments and Diary projects, my
initial questioning of place and identity utilized a visual method of inquiry,
first implemented on myself, then engaged and applied to others. These
experiments formed the foundations and methodology for the Meta Portrait
as a site-oriented and socially engaged method of inquiry.
In chapter two I will describe a hybrid methodology at the intersection of
ethnographic artistic practices and participatory design research practices.
Key terms and concepts will be introduced such as: design thinking, socially
engaged public practice, cultural probes, and reflexive methods of inquiry.
In chapter three I will be examining the concepts of site and place within
the work of artists and designers: Renée Green, Lucy Kimbell, Candy
Chang, and Susan Hiller. This section will conclude with the concept of a
living archive, examining the notion of the archive as a site -- a space in
which an individual and collective perception of place can be explored
and experienced. In chapter four the: methods, observations, limitations,
trajectories, and implications of the Meta Portrait will be examined.

Mapping Meta Portrait

11

2. Hybrid Methodology

Situating the Praxis “The evolution from design to design thinking is the story of the evolution
from the creation of products to the analysis of the relationship between
people and products, and from there to the relationship between people and
people” (Brown, 2009, p.41).
Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, a design and innovation consultancy firm based
in Palo Alto, California is a leading figure in integrated user-centred design
practices. “Design thinking” is a term commonly used by Brown to describe
a non-linear approach to problem solving proposing that design thinking can
be adopted by other professionals within industry to address contemporary
social and environmental issues. The combination of design thinking, user
centred design methodologies and methods are increasingly being used to
effectively empower the individual or end user in industries ranging from
product design to healthcare.
Design thinking, underpins much of the way I approach problem solving
in architecture and as a designer in a more general sense. It is non-linear,
reflexive, collaborative, and participatory in nature. The term first appeared
in the 1980’s with the emerging practice of human-centred design. It
became prominent in the 1990’s by Richard Buchanan, then a Professor of
Design at the University of Chicago, when he wrote his influential article,
Wicked Problems in Design Thinking, proposing that “Design problems are
‘indeterminate’ and ‘wicked’ because design has no special subject matter
of its own apart from what a designer conceives it to be” (p.98).3

3 Buchanan cites the writing of mathematician, and designer Horst Rittel who
proposed the term wicked problem (1972) to describe the often confusing and
contradicting levels of information, values, and consequences designers are
presented with when solving design problems. From Rittel’s arguments, Buchanan
identifies the unique relationship between determinacy and indeterminancy in
design thinking.

Mapping Meta Portrait

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2. Hybrid Methodology

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Timeline Contextualizing Design Thinking
Figure 9.
Timeline contextualizing
design thinking.

In order to visualize and contextualize how I am thinking about design
thinking and socially engaged practice, I have created a series of subjective
timelines in Figures 9, 10, 11 and13. They identify key artists, designers,
and theorists who have framed and influenced the historical and cultural
context of my praxis. The timeline in Figure 9 highlights early design
thinkers, Bruno Munari and Charles & Ray Eames, designers and artists
who were continually pushing the boundaries of design as a vehicle to
understand the world through a material practice. Munari, an Italian artist
and designer, commonly identified as a member of the Futurist movement
and a contemporary of F.T. Marinetti, lived a life of art and design, whose
work often invited the viewer to question the role of design in our everyday
lives. Today he is fondly remembered for his illustrated children books and
his useless machines, a series of kinetic sculptures inspired by Wassily
Kandinsky and other abstract painters of the early 20th century. A useless
machine was an object absent of purpose.4 This body of work gave Munari
the freedom to look beyond the functional ethos of design, triggering a
period of artistic production that allowed him to fully explore his designer’s
curiosity about the world, often blurring the boundaries between art and
design disciplines in pursuit of an aesthetic innovation.
4 In Munari’s book, Design as Art, he describes his kinetic sculptures, produced
between 1934-1954, as useless machines for their inability to satisfy market
demands, increase capital, or produce goods for mass consumption.

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Mapping Meta Portrait

13

2. Hybrid Methodology

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Timeline Situating Meta Portrait
Figure 10. Timeline Situating
Meta Portrait, identfying specific
references for Meta Portrait

The Timeline Situating Meta Portrait in Figure 10 contextualizes the Meta
Portrait with specific references drawn from the designers and research
practitioners identified in the Timeline Contextualizing Design Thinking in
Figure 9. In a 1972 interview, Charles Eames, the celebrated American
architect and designer identifies the importance of acknowledging design
parameters,
Here is one of the few effective keys to the design problem - the ability of the
designer to recognize as many of the constraints as possible - his willingness
and enthusiasm for working within these constraints - the constraints of price,
of size, of strength, balance, of surface, of time, etc.; each problem has its
own peculiar list (2007a, p.155).
Eames highlights the designer’s subjective process in identifying design
parameters and perhaps alludes to how a design will reflect the author
as much as the end-user. Contemporary innovative design research
practitioners such as Liz Sanders of Make Tools, Tim Brown of IDEO, and Bill
Gaver, an interactive design researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London
also recognize the importance of the design team’s collaborative agency in
designing not only the object, experience, or system, but also the parameters
and constraints of the design problem or opportunity. This is one of the key
aspects of design thinking -- one which embraces a reflexive, participatory,
and non-linear approach to problem solving that can be applied across
disciplines and professions. As Tim Brown (2009) of IDEO suggests,

Mapping Meta Portrait

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2. Hybrid Methodology

“The next generation of designers will need to be as comfortable in the
boardroom as they are in the studio or the shop, and they will need to begin
looking at every problem--from adult illiteracy to global warming -- as a
design problem” (p.38).
Contemporary human-centred design practice requires designers to be
empathetic participant observers when working with individuals, groups,
and/or communities during the generative stages of a design process.
Participatory design, co-creation, co-design are all terms commonly used to
describe human-centred research methods. They are meant to engage endusers in a dialogue with designers to reveal insights into the way individuals
relate to their environment, objects, and to each other.
Socially engaged public practice, as an expanded field of public art, is an
art movement characterized by its unique ability to engage and communicate
with a broad and diversified public on issues across social, cultural, and
political divides. The movement has been linked with the Situationists and
the Fluxus artists from the 1950’s, and 1960’s. The writings and artistic
practice of artists such as Allan Kaprow and Guy Dubord firmly established
a precedent; merging life with art, often inviting the viewer to participate
in experimental artwork; incorporating elements of performance and
installation in a spontaneous way. The 1970’s witnessed a more dialogical
approach to social practice with the work of Suzanne Lacy, Judy Baca,
Judy Chicago, and Lesley Labowitz; utilizing “techniques developed in the
feminist movement (consciousness-raising groups, the analysis of self-other
relationships) with artistic strategies drawn from Kaprows happenings and
performance art” (Kester, 2004, p.125). More recently artist Suzanne Lacy
coined the phrase New Genre Public Art in 1995 and the term

Mapping Meta Portrait

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2. Hybrid Methodology
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Timeline Contextualizing Socially Engaged Public Practice /
Critical Theory
Figure 11.
Timeline Contextualizing
Socially Engaged Public
Practice and Critical Theory

Socially Engaged Public Practice5 is now more commonly used within the
contemporary art discourse. The 1990’s also saw the emergence of the
‘artist as ethnographer’6 with the practices of Fred Wilson, Andrea Fraser,
Mark Dion, and Renée Green. These artists continue to push the boundaries
of site-specificity through their site-oriented and project-based works, often
responding to and engaging individuals within an institution, community, or
specific locale.
The Timeline Contextualizing Socially Engaged Public Practice and Critical
Theory in Figure 11 illustrates my interpretation of a streamlined overview
of socially engaged art practitioners and critical theorists who are informing
and contextualizing the way in which I am thinking about a hybrid social
practice.7 The overview incorporates examples of participatory design
methodologies, curatorial practice, critical theory, and an ethnographic
approach to socially engaged art practice.
5 The term social practice was originally borrowed from sociology by Lydia
Mathews and Ted Purvis in 2004. It has since appeared in the writings of Harrell
Fletcher, Claire Bishop, Clare Doherty, Miwon Kwon, Grant H. Kester, and
Cameron Cartiere.
6 From Hal Foster’s 1996 essay, The Artist as Ethnographer. A critical analysis of
the ethnographic turn in the emerging creative practices of contemporary artists.
7 Guy Debord (Situationists/Paris) and Allan Kaprow (Happenings/New York)
established a precedent for contemporary participatory art practice, often inviting
the viewer/visitor to be part of the artwork, leading the way for other artists such
as Suzanne Lacy, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Renée Green, Mark Dion, Lucy Kimbell,
Sophie Calle, and Candy Chang. Contemporary curators, writers, and critical
theorists such as Mary Jane Jacobs, Hal Foster, Claire Bishop, Clare Doherty,
Miwon Kwon, Grant H. Kester, and Cameron Cartiere have expanded the critical
discourse surrounding site-oriented and socially engaged practice over the last
twenty years.

Mapping Meta Portrait

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2. Hybrid Methodology

Working with people raises further questions -- specifically what constitutes
an audience? The audience whether an end-user, viewer, or participant
is clearly at the intersection between participatory design practices and
socially engaged public art practices. However the methodology and
ways in which data is collected, organized, reinterpreted and presented
Originator
Collaborator
Volunteers/
Performers
Immediate
Audience
Media Audience
Audience of myth
and memory
Figure 12. Suzanne Lacy’s
audience model within a
socially engaged practice. From
Mapping the Terrain: New
Genre Public art (1995), p.178.

back to an audience is potentially what differentiates a socially engaged
practice from a design practice. Suzanne Lacy’s audience model in Figure
12 identifies the layers and the multiple roles individuals can play within a
socially engaged art practice. The originator of the work lies at the centre
of a series of concentric circles, moving outwards Lacy identifies the roles
typically present: collaborators, volunteers, performers, the immediate
audience, and the audience of myth and memory. These roles are not
static, but constantly in flux, with the separating boundaries acting more like
permeable skins. Conversely, within a participatory design framework, the
audience can be thought of as a specific group of end-users usually defined
by age, gender, income bracket, and other criteria for the purposes of
defining the needs of a specified user. In this scenario, the participatory enduser ultimately represents a larger consumer audience for which the product,
experience, and/or service has been designed to satisfy. In merging an
empathetic design and socially engaged art practice together, one would
naturally question the kind of audience, visitor, viewer, or participant a
socially engaged design practice would attract or appeal to?
Typically, during the generative stages of a human-centred design process,
once the raw data is collected from participants and/or user groups, the
information is analyzed and used by the design team in scenario building
and prototyping exercises towards the final design. Rarely is this data seen

Mapping Meta Portrait

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2. Hybrid Methodology
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Timeline Situating Meta Portrait
Figure 13.
Timeline contextualizing
Meta Portrait, combining key
participatory design references
from Figure10 with socially
engaged references from
Figure11

1996

1999

2002

2003

2009

2010 2011

or presented to an outside audience, as it is often used merely as a tool
towards developing the main design objective. This moment in the design
process is one that could be explored further within a hybrid social design
practice, one that could take into consideration and respond to the broader
social, political, and cultural contexts reflected in the collected data.8
The contextual Timeline Situating Meta Portrait in Figure 13 attempts to
merge specific references from the previous contextual timelines in Figures
10 and 11 as a way to visually represent a cultural and historical framing
of the project. The Meta Portrait is foundationally situated within the canon
of participatory design thinking, influenced by the experimental design
and research practices of Charles & Ray Eames, Liz Sanders, Bill Gaver,
and IDEO. In aligning the Meta Portrait with critical theorists such as Yi-Fu
Tuan, Doreen Massey, Miwon Kwon, Grant H. Kester, Claire Doherty, and
Cameron Cartiere, the method of inquiry is provided a new lens through
which to explore the concepts of place and identity in relationship to siteoriented social practices, and expanded fields of public art. In the following
section I will examine the Presence Project, which attempts to expand the
possibilities of pre-design research methodologies as applied to specific
community groups.
8 For contemporary artists and designers working within a socially engaged
model, navigating the ethics of representation is a complex area of discourse that
needs to be taken into consideration when working with human participants. As
I pursue the on-line and physical manifestation of the Meta Portrait, questions of
the extent to which personal information, social networks and identities are to be
revealed will need to be considered. As an academic research project, institutional
research ethics procedures have been followed (Refer to Appendix I).

Mapping Meta Portrait

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2. Hybrid Methodology

Meta Portrait as In 1999, interactive design researchers Bill Gaver, Tony Dunne, and Elena
Cultural Probe Pacenti (2004) proposed cultural probes as a way to “elicit inspirational
responses from people—not comprehensive information about them, but
fragmentary clues about their lives and thoughts” (p.53). The images in Figure
15 are of a cultural probe in the form of a toolkit that Gaver and his research
team designed for the Presence Project in 1999. The purpose of the toolkit
was to elicit responses from the elderly living in three distinct communities
in the following cities: Oslo (Norway), Amsterdam (Netherlands), and Pisa
(Italy).

Figure 14. Presence Project
Toolkits, mapping exercise, and
postcards. Designers and
researchers, Bill Gaver, Tony
Dunne, and Elena
Pacenti,1999.

What is specifically of interest is the way the toolkits were designed. Taking
inspiration from the techniques of collage, pyscho-geographical maps, and
the subversive textual and photographic advertising languages commonly
used by the Situationist artists from the 1950’s, the toolkit consisted of: a
disposable camera, a photo album and media diary, a series of postcard
questionaires, and a mapping exercise -- all designed to access and reveal
insights into the elder’s everyday routines and experiences of place within
their respective communities. Once the data was returned, Gaver’s research

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2. Hybrid Methodology

team utilized the information to stimulate and evoke their imaginations as
artists and designers. “We weren’t trying to reach an objective view of the
elders’ needs through the probes, but instead a more impressionistic account
of their beliefs and desires, their aesthetic preferences and cultural concerns”
(Gaver, Dunne & Pacenti, 1999). Gaver’s research team went on to propose
three different designs for interventions within the specified communities in
response to the information and insights as a result of the cultural probe.9
This approach to cultural probes -- as a way to access and reveal a broad
“impressionistic account” of a community is a key aspect of the Presence
Project’s methodology that is shared with the Meta Portrait. Through the use
of a visual and textual method of inquiry, coupled with a unique framework
for engaging two levels of participants, the generative stage of collecting,
analyzing, and interpreting the data is performed collaboratively and in
dialogue with the primary group of participants. The dialogical engagement
with my primary participants allowed me to access a secondary level of
information, evoking individual reflexive experiences, common/diverging
social, cultural, and political characteristics that continued to shape the
method of questioning for future sessions with the primary participants.
Critical theorist Grant H. Kester identifies the challenges community-based
artists face when working within a socially engaged framework and highlights
the “signifying authority” artists can hold when working collaboratively with
individuals. In reflection, my position as a graduate student placed me in
a less authoritative role as I engaged faculty members and administrators.
This situation allowed for a more reciprocal level of exchange and dialogue.
9 The final design proposals focused on digital networked interventions to assist
and facilitate the elderly in communication and interaction with other inhabitants
within their respective communities.

Mapping Meta Portrait

20

3. Situating Site and Mapping Place

Site and Place This section will identify contemporary artists with unique approaches to
exploring the relationship between place, and identity within site-oriented
artistic practice. Three projects will be examined: Secret by Renée Green,
Audit by Lucy Kimbell, and Before I Die by Candy Chang.
It is not within the scope of this thesis to examine the extensive literature
surrounding concepts of site and place as it has been explored, defined,
contested, and used interchangeably within contemporary art and
architectural discourses over the last forty years, however I feel it is important
to define these terms in order to situate the Meta Portrait within a historical
and cultural context.

Figure 15. Renée Green. Scenes
from a Group Show: Project
Unité, Firminy. 1993. Photo:
Renée Green. Used by
permission of the artist.

“What does it mean to do a site-specific work, and how is it possible to
do or make something which has any effect on an environment unfamiliar
to one, or which has a significant effect upon oneself. Ultimately I think the
latter half of the above question is the recurring beginning for me, because
whatever is done or made reflects oneself, even when another environment
is meant to be a focus. How literally one brings this subjective perspective to
the forefront of course varies” (Green, 1992, p.78).

Mapping Meta Portrait

21

3. Situating Site and Mapping Place

Figure 16. Renée Green. Scenes
from a Group Show: Project
Unité, Firminy. 1993. Used by
permission of the artist.

African-American artist, Renée Green engages in a type of ethnographic
fieldwork practice. Her work is often described as site oriented and project
based, constantly challenging the boundaries of site-specificity to incorporate
more expansive understandings of cultural and social conditions. She is
able to work in a multitude of mediums: sculpture, installation, architecture,
photography, and video just to name a few.
Project Unité, Firminy, was a place-based exhibition10 that took place at
Unité d’Habitation, one of the 20th century’s most influential examples of
modernist architecture, designed by architect Le Corbusier. For one week
Green inhabited the cell-like apartment she was assigned. During her stay
she established her own place within a place, erecting a pitched tent within
the apartment from which she would read books about Le Corbusier, reflect

10 Claire Doherty in her book Situation identifies place-based event exhibitions
as an indication of the contemporary curatorial trend to address the discourse of
place-making.

Mapping Meta Portrait

22

3. Situating Site and Mapping Place

on ideas of space, sketch, photograph, film and write journal entries of her
everyday experiences. The resulting daily production was then displayed
within the apartment for viewing by visitors when the artist was not there as
shown in Figures 15 & 16.
In Secret (1992), Green was influenced by Michel de Certeau’s definition
of space and place. “Place implies a fixed location, ‘the elements taken into
consideration and beside one another’, each situated in its own ‘proper and
distinct location’, whereas space is defined as a ‘practiced place’.”(Green,
2009a, p.78). For Green, the intersection or meeting of the artist and the
place became the space for cultural production. Through this lens, she was
able to inhabit the place with a clear inquiry in mind. “A preoccupation of
mine, in this and some previous work, has been: how does one designate a
private space for reflection in a public space?” (Green, 2009a, p.78).
Green’s artistic methods of production and intention to explore one’s unique
sense of place within an unfamiliar locale is what is of interest to me in
relationship to the Meta Portrait. Upon establishing a “private space for
reflection” Green creates a documentative framework from which to explore
a subjective interpretation of a place. Similarily, the Meta Portrait can be
understood as a type of socially engaged framework -- a “space” to explore
one’s unique interpretation of place.

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23

3. Situating Site and Mapping Place

In her book, Re/Placing Public Art: The Role of Place-specificity in New
Genre Public Art, Cameron Cartiere suggests:
A public artist working within a place-specific model can, at best, only
put forth their own version of that place; a version that inherently is a
unique interpretation of the place given the individualised reference to
place that, according to Bachelard, each of us carry with us (2010,
p.40).
The intention of the Meta Portrait is not to reflect an objective sense of place,
but rather a subjective one that is derived collectively. As Green’s Secret
and Diary (1976-2009) illustrates, defining place is highly subjective to
our individual experiences and memories.
Many contemporary artists continue to push the boundaries of
interdisciplinary social practice. Lucy Kimbell is a British artist whose
background in management consultancy informs her work -- often
Figure 17. Lucy Kimbell. Audit.
2002, p. 72. Example of a
completed survey. Reproduction
used by permission of the artist.

incorporating elements of art, design, social sciences, and unique methods
of data gathering.

Mapping Meta Portrait

24

3. Situating Site and Mapping Place

Figure 18. Lucy Kimbell. Audit.
2002, p. 73. Excerpt from book
used by permission of artist.

In Audit (2002) Kimbell invited 70 friends, colleagues, and family members
to assess and rate various aspects of her personal and public life across
nine categories: relationships, context, financial value, cultural value, social
value, environmental value, value to others, value of the specific audit, and
the last section in the form of a question - What am I worth? The data was
collected using survey questionnaires Kimbell had designed, as shown in
Figure 17, and reinterpreted through a series of information graphics as
shown in Figure 18. The graphics revealed unique insights into the way
we collectively and individually define personal value. The final work was
presented in book form. Additionally, one can download electronic copies

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25

3. Situating Site and Mapping Place

of the questionaires from the artist’s website to potentially try on their own.11
Audit is an example of a project which is difficult to contextualize, even
Kimbell recognizes this by the end of the process of analyzing the data. In
an interview with an auditor she comes to the conclusion that perhaps the
project was not an audit but a portrait of herself, collectively explored by her
social network consisting largely of two main groups of people, her business
colleagues and her professional artistic community. From my reading, this
work sits at the intersection between ethnographic artistic practice and
human-centred design. On the back of the artist’s book, one can find the
following category tags, “Accountancy / Art / Business / Cultural Studies /
Economics / Humour / Management / Philosophy / Psychology / Sociology
/ and nearly any other discipline you care to think of”. In the introduction to
the book Kimbell identifies some of the questions readers may have about
the project. There are a few which resonate with the Meta Portrait, one
specifically alludes to the applied possibilities for the data gathered,
“Some readers will want to know if the methods explored in the book have
any relevance as research tools in the field of management. They will try to
identify elements of the book that might be useful to other people, if shorn of
their more creative aspects” (p.5).
As a designer and artist, the data generated inspired me to think about
how this ethnographic method of artistic inquiry may continue to inform
other areas of knowledge and artistic production. What does the generated
information reveal about people, communities, cities? What is less clear
in Kimbell’s documentation is how the self-reflexive process of her audit
effected her -- as an artist, woman, friend, daughter, colleague, etc.

11 The Audit questionaires can be downloaded from the artist’s website:
lucykimbell.com

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3. Situating Site and Mapping Place

“Before I die I want to…sing for millions, see my daughter graduate, eat
a salad with an alien, see the leaves change many times, be someone’s
cavalry, straddle the International Date Line...” (Candy Chang, 2011, para.
2).
Candy Chang is a public artist, designer, and urban planner. Her practice
often engages individuals living in communities and cities in a dialogue
about public spaces and how those spaces can be better designed to
support and nurture the well being of individuals living within communities.
In her installation, Before I Die she was able to engage a community in New
Orleans -- post hurricane Katrina, in a dialogue about the regeneration of
place through a participatory art installation. The project involved cladding
the exterior walls of a condemned dwelling with a series of stencilled
chalkboards (Figure 19 & 20). The stencilled text was a fill in the blank
Figure 19. Candy Chang.
Before I Die. 2011. Installation
participation.

question – “Before I die I want to _____”. Through this engagement Chang
was able to engage a community into a dialogue about the future aspirations
of the residents within a community. She also designed a Do-It-Yourself
toolkit (Figure 21) which includes materials and instructions for individuals
to implement in their own communities. The toolkit can be requested from
her website.

Figure 20. Candy Chang.
Before I Die. 2011. Installation
view.

Mapping Meta Portrait

27

3. Situating Site and Mapping Place

This additional facet of the project perhaps contextualizes the installation
more as a tool for engagement and challenges the notion of site-specificity.
Before I Die interventions have recently been implemented in other cities such
as Brooklyn (NY), Chicago, San Diego, Amsterdam, and Lisbon. The recent
intervention in Chicago will witness the wall installation situated within six
different neighbourhoods across the city. Chang’s toolkit and instructions for
implementation is versatile enough to be applied to communities globally
-- resonating with social events such as PechaKucha Night, which operates
as a non-profit organization.12 However, the engagement with the place
allows it to maintain an element of locality within the context in which it is
situated, generating content specific to that place. In a similar fashion the
Meta Portrait, understood as a framework for engagement may have the
potential versatility to be applied to other types of communities: institutions,
government bodies, corporate entities, etc.
The Meta Portrait as a site-oriented socially engaged cultural probe aligns
closely to Doreen Massey’s understanding of place as a point of departure:
Figure 21. Candy Chang.
Before I Die. 2011.
Do-It-Yourself toolkit.

Instead then, of thinking of places as areas with boundaries around, they
can be imagined as articulated moments in networks of social relations
and understandings, but where a larger proportion of those relations,
experiences and understandings are constructed on a far larger scale than
what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself, whether that
be a street, or a region or even a continent. And this in turn allows a sense
of place which is extroverted, which includes a consciousness of its links with
the wider world, which integrates in a positive way the global and the local
(1994, p.154).
Massey’s notion of place as “articulated moments in networks of social
relations” implies a sense of temporal fixity from a global position. Although
there are only a core group of five primary participants, each individual
12 PechaKucha Night™ operates as a non-profit organization. Partnering cities
only need to apply for a handshake agreement to host PechaKucha Nights in their
own cities

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3. Situating Site and Mapping Place

represents connections to an additional twenty secondary participants -potentially separated geographically by city, country, or continent. It should
also be noted that Massey’s notion of place is subjective and unique to the
individual who is defining that “articulated moment”. Humanist geographer
Yi-Fu Tuan identifies a universal understanding of place as home “unique to
human beings among primates is the sense of the home as a place where
the sick and the injured can recover under solicitous care” (1977, p.137).
If a universal understanding of the home as place is one that all human
beings inherently share, then Massey’s interpretation of place as “articulated
moments in networks of social relations” can also be thought of as temporal
nodes consisting of a community of places -- or homes, as embodied in
each individual. Within this context the Meta Portrait, as a socially engaged
cultural probe has the potential to reveal the unique characteristics and
social relations which constitute an individual’s understanding of place.

Mapping Meta Portrait

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3. Situating Site and Mapping Place

Mapping a Living Archive American artist Susan Hiller engages in an artistic practice that combines her
background in anthropology and ability to employ new media and material
installation to create unique spaces for questioning the “forces at work in
making and re-making of subjectivity and its potential for transformation”
(Lingwood, 2004, p.9). Working with collected objects is a common thread
that circulates throughout Hiller’s installations. In At the Freud Museum (1994)
Hiller works with the museum’s existing collection, combining them with
her own random collection of objects to produce a series of assemblages
framed within archeological collecting boxes. The artist’s method begins
with narratives that connect Hiller to the objects. The boxes were displayed
in an existing vitrine located within Freud’s house - turned museum. Hiller
describes the parameters of the site as a multi-layered spatial heirarchy
“A box within a vitrine within a room within this institutional space within
this house - one is attempting to carve out a space in which something else
can happen, to make some kind of intervention” (Hiller, 1994, p. 45). The
archive as a contested space to allow an artist to engage in a discursive
dialogue with a collection of objects, documents, or photographs is a
method that has been used by other artists such as Mark Dion, Cabinet of
Curiosities, Weismann Art Museum, 2001, and Fred Wilson’s Mining the
Museum, 1992.13
The parameters of the site for the Meta Portrait can also be understood
as a type of multi-layered spatial heirarchy, except in this case the spatial
heirarchies can be thought of as social heirarchies within the institutional
framework, beginning with me as a graduate student within a curated
13 It is not within the scope of this thesis to examine the archive in relationship to
the contemporary art discourse surrounding institutional critique beyond the artist’s
ethnographic approach to methods of production.

Mapping Meta Portrait

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3. Situating Site and Mapping Place

group consisting of an administrator, assistant professor, and sessional
instructors. The generated archive of digital image and text responses from
each individual’s social network collectively reflects a place-specificity that
captures a subjective and complex series of interconnected social relations
within a local and global context -- a type of “time-space compression”
(Massey, 1994). Massey uses the term “power geometry” to describe the
movements of individuals and social groups in relation to the different scales
and levels of systems in play within a place. She uses an analogy that is
similar to a 1968 documentary film called The Powers of Ten by Charles &
Ray Eames in which the viewer is presented with a constantly increasing
frame of view beginning with two people lying down on a blanket and
ending with a view of the earth represented as a mere dot within the frame.
In thinking about the notion of Massey’s “power geometry” in relationship
to the individual social networks of my primary collaborators, one might
grasp an understanding of the positions we occupy in relationship to the
intricate movements of social relations that exist between the varying levels
and scales of connectivity within the institution.

Mapping Meta Portrait

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4. Mapping Meta Portrait

Figure 22.
Meta Portrait. Mapping of
audience model. Identifying
roles and number of participants
in relationship to each other

se

da
con

E

r y pa

y
m il

r tic ip a nt

Car

s

r C om

m unity

E.Yon

pr

im

a

r ti ci p a n t s
r y pa

H.May

S.Rodrigues

ori

gin a tor
R.Wong
E.Yon

H.May
J.Birch
E.Yon

Invited Participant who did
not contribute an image/text

*

Secondary Participants
Primary Participants
* Extra Participant

Cultural Probe in Action As a site-oriented socially engaged cultural probe, the four primary
participants14 were chosen from the community of staff and faculty at Emily
Carr University. The rationale for choosing a small cross-section of individuals
outside of my own research, practice, and position within the institution was
to potentially reveal a variety of social network types, subjective filters, and
14 Jesse Birch is a sessional instructor in Critical and Cultural Studies. He is a
curator and artist who has exhibited both nationally and internationally.
Heidi May is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and sessional instructor who has
taught at Emily Carr University since 2002.
Sadira Rodrigues is the Dean of Continuing Studies at Emily Carr University. Over
the last decade she has worked in a variety of roles as a curator, writer, educator,
facilitator, public programmer, and arts administrator.
Rita Wong is an Associate Professor in Critical and Cultural Studies. Her praxis
investigates the relationships between contemporary poetics, social justice, ecology,
and decolonization.

Mapping Meta Portrait

32

4. Mapping Meta Portrait

cultural perspectives within an established community -- or site. The graphic
visualization in Figure 22 identifies the roles of the primary and secondary
participants in relationship to me as the originator of the work. It illustrates
the multiple roles I occupied across each stage of the socially engaged
method of inquiry as: originator of the work, primary participant, and
secondary participant. Heidi May was the only other primary participant
who occupied both a primary and secondary participant role.
The primary participants were asked to solicit twenty (20) images and
accompanying text rationales from individuals within their social network.
The secondary participants were then invited to choose one digital image
they believed best represented the primary participants character, and/or
relationship to them. The image is accompanied by a paragraph rationale
for their choice of image. I also requested that the image not be a true
photographic representation of that person. It is interesting to note that in
the earlier experiments using this method, there exists an inherent rationale
and/or question primary participants asked of themselves before choosing
their secondary participants. In this way, the sets of images and texts begin
to provide a framework for an individual and collective representation to
evolve.
Once the images and texts were returned, the five (5) primary participants
are represented by twenty (20) images and twenty (20) accompanying
text rationales. In this iteration, seventy (70) responses were returned out
of a possible one hundred (100). As a way to access, interpret and work
with the responses for the collaborative work sessions with my primary
participants I created image and text cards using standard archival tags

Mapping Meta Portrait

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4. Mapping Meta Portrait

and colour laser printed copies of the returned images. On the back of each
card I transferred the text responses by hand as shown in Figure 23. The
process of handwriting the text onto the cards allowed me time to reflect and
become more familiar with the returned material. The beginning of the work
sessions with my primary participants consistently started with a question
to understand their initial rationale for choosing the twenty individuals from
their respective social networks. The rationales varied -- from choosing only
women, to choosing a mixture of friends/colleagues/mentors/family, to
choosing individuals whom they know only through on-line social media
platforms. As I had managed to collect twenty responses, and my participants
only a portion, I decided to level the playing field and asked my participants
to remove the difference so that we both had the same number of cards.
Figure 23.
Example of image response
(above). Example of text
response transfered onto the
back of each image card
(below)

Without disclosing the next step of the process, the participants chose the
cards to be removed purely based on their preference of the visual image.
From here, we exchanged our individual sets of cards, taking turns reading
the text responses to each other. This process of one person reading whilst
the other person listened allowed us to shift our perspectives and challenged
us to view ourselves through the lenses of our secondary participants. After
reading each text response, the person listening would often elaborate and
our conversations would often engage our experiences and memories of
people, places, art, objects, food, and other personal/professional interests.
The final stage of our work sessions ended with a more experimental approach
towards working with the cards. Using a webcam mounted over my drawing
table I was able to record the different configurations and ways in which
we organized and worked with the cards, often arranging them according

Mapping Meta Portrait

34

4. Mapping Meta Portrait

to common themes, narratives, and/or chronologically. The exercise utilized
Post-it™ notes as a way of documenting key words or groupings of cards,
as shown in Figure 24. During this process we were able to see where our
collective representations crossed paths and where they diverged.
Portrait Observations In my first collaborative work session with Rita Wong it was apparent
that her cultural background, environmental activism, and current praxis
investigating the politics and poetics of water represented the ways in which
her colleagues, friends, and family perceived her. Life and work for Rita
seemed closely related. The returned image and text responses for Rita also
revealed a unique social network composed of poets, writers, academics,
close friends, and family who were all creatively inclined. Many of the
responses were in the form of hand drawn illustrations, personal photographs,
Figure 24.
Image still from digital webcam
video capture, working with Rita
and groupings of image/text
cards, identifying themes and
keywords

poems, and anecdotes. In our initial exercise working with the cards, a
few distinct groupings began to emerge underneath three themes: stillness,
movement, and liminal space.

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4. Mapping Meta Portrait

In reflection, my collaborative working session with Rita revealed a layer
of representation and cultural identity that we both shared but was not as
evident in my portrait as much as it was in hers. Triggered by the text and
image response from her father as shown in Figure 25, Rita recalled her
experience of visiting her family’s village in southern China, a trip she took to
reconnect with her past through the place of her ancestors. Even though the
climate was uncomfortably hot and humid, she described a natural physical
comfort just being there. This attempt to reconnect with her cultural identity
through an ancestral place, along with the emergent themes of stillness,
movement, and liminal space triggered a questioning of my own cultural
identity and inspired a new approach to working with a photographic slide
Figure 25.
a. Mr.Wong (Rita’s father) text
response, b. Mr.Wong’s drawing of
family village in China, c. Poem by
Fred Wah, mentor & friend
a.

library which I had inherited from a man who had passed away last year.

b.

c.

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4. Mapping Meta Portrait

Figure 26.
Where She Dwells, A Portrait of
Heidi May. An image and text
response for Heidi May from
on-line friend, Rachel Baumann.

In Heidi May’s case, the reflexive nature of our conversations revealed
memories mediated by virtual and real worlds. Admitting that she watched
a lot of television as a child, she realized as a young adult how her early
memories were mediated by TV sitcoms, and sometimes questioned whether
her personal memories actually occurred or if they were projected realities.
The notion of a virtual place appeared in a few of Heidi’s responses from
individuals she knew on-line, but had never personally met. A few of these
individuals tried to visually situate Heidi using Google Maps. The image and
text response in Figure 26 is from Rachel Baumann, a guest who attended a
group exhibition and video screening of Heidi’s in Vancouver. Although they
have never met personally, they are now connected via an on-line social
media platform. Baumann responded with a 350 word text response in

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4. Mapping Meta Portrait

which she explored the notion of virtual relationships within a virtual realm
and ended with the following:
It is a landscape portrait of Heidi May dwelling on a satellite image plateau
generated through meta-web-textualities; and it works to unsettle my own
assumptions about how site and space work to constitute subjects as
persons and as objects of representational practices. Heidi May dwells near
elsewhere (2011).
Other responses from Heidi’s on-line community returned similar images
referencing social media platforms as a way to situate their relationship.
Her rationale for choosing ten (10) participants she had never personally
met, but only knew from on-line exchanges was an interesting experiment
and not surprisingly resulted in images referencing the virtual place of their
interaction. The other ten (10) responses came from friends, family, and
colleagues within Heidi’s “real” social network and all referenced physical
places, objects, and abstract conceptual illustrations and/or artwork.
This insight revealed the weight and nature of physical places in defining
our experiences, relationships, our own identities and triggered a line of
questioning surrounding our virtual social networks -- how do we think about
our identities and place within a virtual community?
Taking the Emily Carr community, as an example, students, faculty, and staff
all have a presence in the form of dedicated profile pages on the official
university website. In many ways, it is the first point of contact for prospective
students to obtain a sense of the type of people who are working, teaching,
and practicing at this Institution. In fact, it played a key role in assisting me
to research potential primary participants for the Meta Portrait, allowing me
to digitally sort through profile pages categorized by faculty departments.
The Meta Portrait allowed me to create my own community within the
larger institutional community, an academic support network composed of

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4. Mapping Meta Portrait

individuals who shared my research interests and allowed me to “carve” out
a space in which my own research goals could be explored. Perhaps it was
a type of literature review that needed to be experienced rather than read.
This insight triggered ideas for applied possibilities for the Meta Portrait -perhaps as a website tool for incoming graduate students or other research
practitioners to search for individuals who have similar research interests,
acting as a way to quickly obtain a sense of the type of expanded support
network that would be available to them outside of the traditional facilitybased resources of the institution. Within the discourse of participatory
design and user-centred research, the Meta Portrait could assist students to
become active participants in the design of their post-secondary learning
experience, allowing them agency in establishing their own specialized
academic support networks. This trajectory could expand the discourse
surrounding student-centred pedagogical practices.
The image and text responses from Sadira Rodrigues’ social network came
from a mixture of friends, family, and colleagues. She began by admitting,
“I inhabit different spaces in different ways and I wanted to make sure
those various spaces were reflected”. Sadira’s responses revealed a
strong character with easily identifiable groupings of images and texts
that referenced a keen awareness of her cultural identity, as transcended
through her love of nature and cooking. The separation of life and work was
apparent in her responses -- aspects which were not autonomous in both
Rita and Heidi’s portraits. However, compared to my own set it revealed an
opposite portrait, one which reflected a strong sense of being situated in a
liminal space -- in transition perhaps.

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4. Mapping Meta Portrait

Unlike Sadira, my responses were more difficult to categorize into defined
groupings and themes, an aspect I hadn’t noticed during the previous work
sessions with Rita and Heidi. The images in Figure 27 show a sample
grouping of images from our respective secondary participants. Many of
the associated text responses for Sadira referenced nature and included the
following descriptive words:
solid • peace • balance • steady • defiance • serenity •
solace • strong • grace • independent • daring • enduring •
thoughtful • calm • cautious • stands tall • giving • rooted •
versatile • support • structure • unveiling • rivaling •
shelter • blossoming • beautiful • nurturing protect •
nurture • dignity • indignant • majestic •
Comparatively, my associated text responses referencing nature included
the following descriptive words:
contemplative • solid • kind • connector • fanciful •
no beginning • no end • dark • directionless • adrift •
lows • storms • quiet • richness • calm • mysterious •
precision • impactful • comfortable • independence • highs •
diligence • motivation • inquisitiveness • curious • climbing •
In comparing our text responses, two matching words immediately stood out
to me -- solid and calm. Although Sadira spent her formative years in a rural
environment, and I in a large metropolitan city, we both received images
referencing nature, however, as illustrated, the majority of the descriptive
words paint different pictures of our character. Solid and calm are the only

Mapping Meta Portrait

4. Mapping Meta Portrait

Figure 27.
Image responses referencing
nature and food.Sadira
(bottom-left), and mine (topright).

40

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4. Mapping Meta Portrait

words which we shared. For many people nature implies a fixed sense of
place, Massey suggests “We use such places to situate ourselves, to convince
ourselves that there is indeed a grounding (2005, p.131). She continues to
question place as it relates to nature “How then to think this notion of place
as a temporary constellation, as a time-space event, in relation to this ‘other’
arena, ‘the natural world? (p.131).15
The other strong grouping of images referenced Sadira’s love of cooking. It
was only during our conversations that I noticed one image that referenced
my love of food. In both cases, the images represented our cultural
backgrounds; Indian and Chinese. We shared our memories of growing
up with our mother’s cooking and the ability of ethnic cooking to transcend
culture and identity.
My last participant, Jesse Birch, had yet another rationale for choosing his
secondary participants -- inviting close friends who were geographically
separated from him. He was interested to see whether a meaningful
connection could be made with the people he no longer had a physical
connection with. A response from an old girlfriend triggered a conversation
about the negotiation of home, explaining the difficulty they had in deciding
where to live together; as she was a visiting student from Australia. For a
while the solution was to live in places in-between, a “liminal space” as
Jesse described it. Jesse proposed a different lens in which to look at place
-- from the perspective of a new-comer. What is lost when one is relocated to
a new place? Conversely, what is gained, and what is potentially created?
15 Massey acknowledges the extensive literature surrounding nature and its role in
understanding place. However, she continues to argue that nature is not a fixed place, but
rather one that is constantly changing geologically. Space and time are not in sync but are
separated, moving constantly and at various rates.

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4. Mapping Meta Portrait

Our conversation allowed me to consider the feeling of placelessness newcomers might feel when arriving in a new city or country for the first time.
I recalled stories my parents shared with us as kids growing up in Toronto
-- how they were forced to leave China because of the political and social
turmoil caused by the Cultural Revolution, immigrating to Peru, then to Toronto
where my parents took shelter within the burgeoning Chinese community.
The social infrastructure within Toronto’s Chinatown at the time was robust
enough to allow my parents to support themselves, finding accommodation
and employment without having to leave the comforting confines of
Chinatown. Perhaps the facsimile of their ancestral home as reflected in
the language, people, and food played an integral role in allowing my
parents to make new connections and ultimately a new home, eventually
moving out of Chinatown and into a middle-class existence outside of the
city centre. I am reminded of a parting piece of advice my father gave me
when I left home for my first trip to Europe. “Don’t worry if you find yourself
in a strange place” he said confidently -- “there will always be a Chinese
restaurant nearby.” Perhaps it was his way of saying that you will always be
home where ever you go.

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4. Mapping Meta Portrait

Figure 28.
Mapping exercise with Jesse
Birch. Photo: Elisa Yon. Used by
permission of the artist

My collaborative work session with Jesse ended with a simple mapping
exercise, which perhaps illustrates Massey’s notion of place as a spatiotemporal event, “places not as points or areas on maps, but as integrations
of space and time” (2005, p.130). The image in Figure 28 and the graphic
visualization in Figure 29 shows our respective image cards situated on
a subjective map of the world with the Pacific Ocean at the centre. We
wondered if our place could be negotiated at that moment through mapping
the current location of our friends to determine an imaginary spatio-temporal
event that would be located somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
This exercise in “unfixing place” aligns with Claire Doherty’s understanding
of place:
If we understand place as an unstable, shifting set of political, social,
economic and material relations, and locality as produced and contested
through a set of conditions that we might describe as situation, our experience
of works which truly produce remarkable engagements with place will be
characterized by a sense of dislocation - encouraging us no longer to look
with the eyes of a tourist, but to become implicated in the jostling contingency
of mobilities and relations that constitute contemporaneity (Doherty, 2009,
p.18).

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4. Mapping Meta Portrait

Edinburgh

Montreal

Vancouver

Germany
Victoria

Regina

Luxembourg

Toronto

pacific
ocean

San Francisco

New York
Kyoto

Mexico

Australia

Figure 29. Mapping Exercise.
A graphic visualization of my
mapping exercise with Jesse
Birch (from Figure 28).

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4. Mapping Meta Portrait

Doherty suggests the term “situation” to describe the negotiation of place
within an anchored locality and alludes to the ability of creative practitioners
to catalyze a “situation” through a socially engaged practice.
In considering how the Meta Portrait may live within the public realm, I
returned to the questions raised from Heidi’s portrait thread in relationship to
the expanded notion of audiences present and accessible within the virtual
public realm. Kapsul is an on-line, open-source platform that is used to share
and collect images, texts, and videos with others.16 Individuals can create
archives or Kapsuls that are accessible publicly, or privately with other
invited individuals. I decided to use this existing on-line platform as a site to
nest the Meta Portrait within its 239 publicly accessible Kapsuls.
Figure 30. Screen capture of the
Meta Portrait Kapsul shown
nested within the other publicly
accessible Kapsuls.

16 Kapsul.org was created by the Kadist Art Foundation, a non-profit organization
based in San Francisco and Paris. “The foundation participates in the development
of society through contemporary art, collecting and producing the work of artists
and conducting various programs to promote their role as cultural agents.”

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4. Mapping Meta Portrait

In this iteration, the project lives as a collaborative image and text archive
as well as an experimental socially engaged art project. Most of the images
and text responses from the primary collaborators can be accessed from the
public Kapsul. Once inside the Kapsul, the viewer can click on individual
image portraits to reveal the associated text responses.
Figure 31.
A screen capture showing an
example of the image and text
presentation within the Meta
Portrait Kapsul.

Since its inception on February 11th, 2012, two additional Meta Portraits
have been added on line, with additional singular contributions from the
general public. It has received 409 visits to date and currently ranks number
18 as the most visited Kapsul out of the 239 publicly accessible kapsuls.17
The final iteration of the Meta Portrait evolved out of the question of how
might the Meta Portrait live within the physical public realm and address the
audience of myth and memory as highlighted previously in Lacy’s audience
model from Figure 12.
17 Figures correct as of May 23, 2012.

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4. Mapping Meta Portrait

The public representation of the Meta Portrait on kapsul.org raised questions
surrounding the types of expanded audiences that are accessible from the
use of social media and open-source sharing platforms. However I was
curious to explore how the Meta Portrait might live within the physical realm
of our everyday experiences. In thinking about this I turned to Sherry Turkle’s
notion of the “evocative object”18:
We find it familiar to consider objects as useful or aesthetic, as necessities
or vain indulgences. We are on less familiar ground when we consider
objects as companions to our emotional lives or as provocations to thought.
The notion of evocative objects brings together these two less familiar ideas,
underscoring the inseparability of thought and feeling in our relationship to
things. We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with.
(2007, p.5)
Turkle reminded me about the personal objects many people carry on a
daily basis, such as personal agendas, wallets, cell phones, and keys. I
gravitated towards the keychain as an object with the capacity to hold both
an emotional and functional value within our everyday. A short investigation
with cohorts and friends revealed some interesting memories individuals had
associated with these objects. After a while, I began to see the keychains
as both a reflection of the individual’s character and as a potential tool for
social engagement. I was curious to see if an “evocative object” could be
conceived that would link the virtual Meta Portrait to our everyday lived
experiences, specifically those moments of social interaction with others.

As a response, I produced a limited set of twenty keys (Figure 32) in the
form of keychains. Each key holds a unique Quick Response (QR) code that
has been laser-cut into Baltic Birch plywood. When scanned by a QR code
18 Dr. Sherry Turkle is a professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at
MIT. She has written extensively on the relationships between technology and the self.

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4. Mapping Meta Portrait

Figure 32.
A limited set of twenty Meta
Portrait keys with unique QR
codes laser-cut into Baltic Birch
plywood. Photo: Elisa Yon. Used
by permission of the artist.

Figure 33.
Meta Portrait key as an
“evocative object” amongst our
everyday personal objects.
Photo: Elisa Yon. Used by
permission of the artist

scanner on a smart mobile device, the QR code will lead you to a private
kapsul that can only be seen by me and the owner of the key. Embedded
within each of the twenty private kapsuls is one of my twenty image and text
portraits from my own portrait thread. The owner of the key will also be able
to access instructions on how to engage in their own process of reflexive
inquiry through creating their own Meta Portrait.

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4. Mapping Meta Portrait

Figure 34.
A screen capture showing an
example of the image and text
presentation within the Meta
Portrait Kapsul. Photo: Elisa Yon.
Used by permission of the artist.

The intention of the keys is to scatter them amongst twenty other individuals
within my present social network. It is envisioned that these fragments of
my portrait will live inconspicuously amongst the everyday items of each
individual. As these keys are dispersed, the Meta Portrait may continue to
live spontaneously within social gatherings, potentially accompanying our
place-settings when meeting friends in a cafe or bar -- allowing the object
to trigger questions and infiltrate casual conversations. Figure 33 illustrates
an example screen image of what one will see on their smart mobile device
once the QR code is scanned. The instructions are embedded in the icons
along with one of my twenty image and text portraits. The final section
of this thesis will conclude with the trajectories, reflections, and applied
possibilities for the Meta Portrait.

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4. Mapping Meta Portrait

Mapping Trajectories “Where Ever You Go, You Will Be A City”19
and Reflections (Robertson, 2011)
Canadian writer and poet Lisa Robertson contributed the above text to a
public art project in Vancouver called Digital Natives, co-curated by Lorna
Brown and Clint Burnham in 2011.20 It is a quote that I have come back to
often during the course of my research, as it has challenged me to reflect on
how I understand place within my “situation” (Doherty). The Meta Portrait
revealed the many layers that make up my own metaphorical “city” as
reflected in the cultural (ethnic cuisine, popular culture, artistic practices),
social (relationship types, institutional hierarchies), and political layers
(ethnic backgrounds, family histories) of identity that emerged through my
collaborative engagements with the primary collaborators. One could argue
that these are layers we uniquely and inherently carry within us -- similar
perhaps to how one might think about cities. The Meta Portrait allowed
me to carve out a place (Massey) in which to engage primary participants
in conversations and questions regarding our own subjectivities towards
representation, and identity. My collaboration with Rita Wong revealed a
new line of questioning regarding my own ancestral sense of place and
inspired me to embark on a new body of work called the Stranger’s Archive.

19 In correspondence with Lisa Robertson, it has been revealed that her
contributed text to the Digital Natives project was borrowed from Hannah Arendt’s
Human Condition (1958) who was citing from Aristotle.
20 Digital Natives was a public art project that took place between April 4-30,
2011. Utilizing a digital billboard overlooking the Burrard Street Bridge in
Vancouver, Brown and Burnham curated and displayed 56 text messages in the
form of 140 character Twitter contributions from professional artists and writers as
well as members of the public.

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Curiosity and the possibilities of the unknown, coupled with an empathetic
and ethnographic approach to a socially engaged method of inquiry
created a situation in which many possible trajectories could have been
explored within the Meta Portrait. The creative process of engagement with
the primary collaborators facilitated an exchange that was anchored within
the discourse of participatory pre-design methods of engagement (Gaver).
In reflection, this process could also have been contextualized within the
discourse of dialogical practice, in which Kester identifies conversation as
being a key aspect in manifesting the work within collaborative art practices.21
The discussions revealed expansive social networks situated both locally
and globally. The hierarchical institutional relationships as represented
by student, faculty, and administrator reframed the power dynamic of my
relationship with the primary collaborators. As the originator of the work, I
felt in control of the collaborative engagement, but also subjugated by my
position as a graduate student within the institution. Perhaps this dynamic
provided an equal grounding for the dialogue and exchange that occurred.
As a designer and architect, the unique methodology developed through
the Meta Portrait could be explored further for its possible application within
the generative stages of a design process for architects working within
multi-disciplinary design teams. In the context of educational design and
architecture, how can new spaces for learning be designed in a way to
support and facilitate the collaborative and interdisciplinary nature of faculty
and students? How can virtual communication platforms be integrated into

21 Critical theorist Grant H. Kester proposes that within dialogical practice,
conversation allows the work to be “reframed as an active, generative process
that can help us speak and imagine beyond the limits of fixed identities, official
discourse, and the perceived inevitability of partisan political conflict” (2004, p.8).

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flexible spaces for learning and still be robust enough to accommodate new
innovations in technology and communication? These are perhaps some
of the questions that could be further explored within participatory design
research practices.
The Meta Portrait as a framework for engagement within a place is in
conversation with Chang’s Before I Die and Kimbell’s Audit. It can be
understood as a tool for revealing the invisible layers and unique relationships
that influence our unique sense of place and may be further developed in a
similar fashion to the Do-It-Yourself kits and accessible on-line questionaires
that Chang and Kimbell have made readily available to a wider audience.
This is perhaps a key observation within a hybrid socially engaged design
practice in which the designer and artist is engaged in an empathetic
approach to understanding the lives of people and their environments, but
also reflecting and questioning what they are learning about themselves, and
how their insights and observations can be used to inform their decisions in
a type of fluid, non-linear creative process.
The process of collaboratively working with the primary participants resulted
in a highly reflexive process of questioning how we understand ourselves
from the lens of an other. The visual responses challenged us to think in
terms of metaphor, and textual responses challenged our preconceived
subjectivities and characteristics of our identity. Can the same methodology
be applied to existing personal archives of photographs, books, objects,
etc. to access hidden layers of an individual’s identity? or reveal clues
towards understanding an individual’s unique sense of place? Conversely,
can the methodology be applied to understand and reflect a portrait of a

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place? The possibilities for a type of place-specific social design practice,
one with the capacity to understand individuals, communities, or cities
through temporal and impermanent interventions within the public realm
may contribute and expand contemporary discourses and knowledge
production in the following fields of research: urban design, architecture,
ethnography, anthropology, socially engaged public art practice, pre-design
research practice, transformation design, and arts-based research methods
and pedagogy.
In our present condition of global economic, political, and environmental
instability there is an increasing sense of urgency amongst contemporary
socially engaged practitioners to somehow be relevant in the world as
practicing artists and designers. A hybrid socially engaged practice,
situated at the intersection of design thinking and ethnographic creative
practices is one that has the potential to reach a broad audience, especially
within our present age of digital communication, social media, and mobile
technologies. Within this context, creating frameworks for engagement in
the form of socially engaged cultural probes may lead to new ways we, as
interdisciplinary creative practitioners can begin to understand and access
the intricate layers of social relations and hierarchies before proposing
interventions to engage and mobilize collective agency within institutions,
communities, and cities.

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Reference List

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Appendix I

Emily Carr University of Art + Design
Approved Research Ethics Board Consent Forms
for Meta Portrait
• Primary Participant dated, 21 March, 2011
• Secondary Participant dated, 21 March, 2011

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Appendix II

Emily Carr University of Art + Design
Application for Ethics Approval Letter
for Meta Portrait
• Letter dated, 17 May, 2011

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Appendix III

Emily Carr University of Art + Design
Approved Research Ethics Board Final Completion Letter
for Meta Portrait
• Letter dated, 7 May, 2012