Ong Yan taught “Inhabiting Media,” at Thomas Jefferson University in 2021. The seminar and workshop examined the dynamic and complex relationship between media and the spatial disciplines of interior design and architecture. The students examined spatial design as media and embodiments of particular ideas and values—and at the impact that communication media have had on the practice of design and the way we experience built environments. The research component of Inhabiting Media equipped students with theoretical frameworks and case studies in order to cultivate a critical understanding of media and space, its strategies and implications. The design workshop activated theoretical understandings with an interdisciplinary and collaborative design project.
Students created photomontages based on historical and theoretical texts of the 1960s and1970s. The readings included writings by Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan, Rem Koolhaas, Guy deBord, among others.
Photomontage by Duaa Fadul, based on Superstudio’s theories and projects in Buckley, Graphic Assembly: Montage, Media, and Experimental Architecture in the 1960s.
Photomontage by Gabrielle Lentini, based on Neil Leach’s Wallpaper Person.
Photomontage by Gabrielle Lentini on Stierli’s Montage and the Metropolis: Architecture, Modernity, and Representation.
Photomontage by Gabrielle Lentini and Hal Foster’s New Monumentality: Architecture and Public Space.
Photomontage by Fanyuan Chen on deBord’s Society of the Spectacle
Photomontage by Gabrielle Lentini on Colomina’s Architectureproduction.
For the seminar, students designed a media project which entailed in-depth research of a time-based logistical system, with possibilities including airports, shipping containers, retail, hotels, parks, warehouses, and offices. Based on their research, they created a mapping to represent the logistics of the system, a spatial inventory. Students were then asked to propose a “counterscenario,” in which a social cause would infiltrate the system. The counterscenario was developed into a prototype design which was inserted into multiple hypothetical scenarios and sites.
Mapping of Amtrak logistic system by Gabrielle Lentini
Spatial Inventory of Amtrak by Gabrielle Lentini
Design prototype for promoting the local community within the Amtrak transportation network. Participatory interactive graffiti to be transmitted from public spaces to train surfaces.
Prototype for local participation employing screen technology. Scenario in New York City’s Bryant Park linked to the public surfaces of Penn Station transit hub.
Scenario of local community posting events in Philadelphia, linking Rittenhouse Square with 30th Street Station’s interior.
Fanyuan Chen researched UCommune, a China-based co-working company. This diagram maps the logistics of UCommune.
