Mapping Meta Portrait: A Socially Engaged Cultural Probe

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.