Ways of Finding: wayfinding in ‘Little Edo’

The idea of the public interior[1] frames a space for civic life to perform and simultaneously challenge the experience and construction of a city image[2]. This paper narrates how undergraduate students from the UK and Japan embarked upon a series of interdisciplinary activities via two Wayfinding Summer Schools in 2017 and 2018 around the ‘Little Edo’ district in Kawagoe, Japan. Famous for its low-rise historic buildings, this collaboration was conceived as a way to emphasise the city’s vitality through its built environment and communicate the value and legacy of intangible cultural heritage to an anticipated larger international audience beyond the 2020 Olympics.

Virtual and augmented realities were investigated alongside analogue practices (including interviews and peripatetic scavenger hunts) to evidence the contemporary city and its spatial processes. With the goal of designing a non-linguistic wayfinding system to help visitors navigate and orientate themselves, this complex ‘matsuri-like’ pedagogic approach offered a rich learning and teaching space in a live project context[3], enabling students to situate their learning[4]. Participating students were from the University of the Arts London - specifically Interior and Spatial Design, Chelsea College of Arts, and Graphic Design at Camberwell College of Arts - together with Human Sciences (Psychology, Sociology and Welfare) at Bunkyo Gakuin University, Tokyo.

References:
1. Pimlott, M. The Public Interior as Idea and Project, Jap Sam Books, 2016
2. Lynch, K. The Image of the City, MIT Press, 1960
3. Anderson, J and Priest, C, Developing a Live Projects Network and Flexible Methodology for live projects. Paper presented at the Live Projects Pedagogy International Symposium 2012, Oxford Brookes University, May 2012.
4. Lave, J. and Wenger, E, Situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995

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