Interview

    Why did you select the Tempelhofer Feld?

Prem Krishnamurthy: We first tried to think about what we thought were important things to do in public space at this moment – and it’s true that it has a lot to do with the situation in Berlin, and its particular phase in lockdown and in the pandemic. But, at the same time, it’s also a state that other places will get to. It prefigures places in East Asia, where we work on a lot of projects, have already seen.

We started with two core ideas. First, encourage people to wear masks, and make that a fun, cool thing to do. And, at the same time, despite physical distancing, we wanted to try to encourage new connections between people, and to encourage people to move outside of their existing comfort zone and trusted relationships – and meet people who weren’t like them.

With those two ideas in mind, we thought about how we might approach them in terms of changing behaviours and changing space – and Tempelhofer Feld seemed the natural place to tackle. It’s one of Berlin’s premier public spaces – a large, open, post-airport runway, that now is, for the most part, unprogrammed. It offered the most expansive field for us to test out some of those design and behavioural ideas.

Ann Richter: We were thinking of messages on different levels – what you see when you arrive, what you experience with other people especially when you involve the mask, and then having this aerial view – a bigger message.

For the idea of giving out masks, as a part of the ‘gamified’ approach to the space, Tempelhofer Feld is also good because you have only three or four entrances – so you can hand them out at these points.

    Has the use of Tempelhofer Feld changed because of the pandemic – is it different now?

PK: In Berlin, there are still guidelines – when you go into stores you must wear masks, the same as in the subway. But, for the most part, most explicit legal restrictions have opened up, so people are gathering for sports, I have a seen a lot of people gathering in quite large groups and quite close together. So, it can even seem weirdly ‘normal.’

    So how did you approach this brief, then?

PK: For the most part, we tried to take this as a more of a methodology, or potential tool rather than choosing a space that had inherently a lot of constraints in terms of usage. We tried to think of it as a place where you could prototype something like this.

You could also say a large space, maybe not even legible as one public area, one space… you could also apply ideas like this in terms of colour-coding and coding in shape, and also in the playfulness in how someone might participate in something like this.

    And in terms of the words spelt out, do the gain some relevance because of the prevalence of drone (and aerial) photography?

PK: For sure. As Ann said, for us, it was important the project represent this extreme spectrum of scale – from the individual behavioural response to the group dynamics, and inter-group dynamics, then all the way up to the entire field. That kind of multi-scale experience also allows for something to have iconicity – a historical work we talked a lot about was Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson.

AR: This is something we could see in a number different spaces; we weren't thinking ‘from the site’ so to speak, but about the situation in Berlin and what we would like to do to change it in a positive way.

PK: The most interesting moment within this health crisis, for me, was when “flatten the curve” became an idea, and people realised that individual behaviour can have systemic effects. That jumping from the individual to the societal scale is hard to do, and design can make more attractive some behaviours that would be to everyone’s benefit – hence the masks.

If you can hand out masks, what can’t you make those something attractive, that people would want to continue to wear and support the desire to wear?

Chris Wu: That's the whole idea, and why we’re excited about combining the macro-scale and the micro-scale (the masks). In East Asia, even though guidelines don’t require people to wear masks, they still wear them, they have become part of their lives. How do we design something that encourages the wearing of masks, that has an extended function – like, it could code you to a zone in the space or a group based on its design and the design of the other part (the zone or group), creating an interactive relationship.

AR: Yes, our ‘game’ idea was that on the mask you have a part of the shape and pattern, and you get the impulse that you could go to that area, which you could also find on a map. And where coloured zones overlapped you could be encouraged to intermingle.

   And, what does this tell us about the role of ‘design’?

PK: Thinking about design as something primarily about the visual field misses the point that it is ultimately about behaviour, culture, social norms and community norms. For us, we’re trying to get to the core of how people relate to public space, how they relate to each other, and how they deal with distancing in a productive manner that is safe but also generative.

In Berlin and other European cities, people appear to be returning to their older social norms without significant changes in public behaviours that might reduce the spread of the virus. Such individual actions increase the risk of infection for the most vulnerable communities. At the same time, a move away from in-person interactions and towards online forums has limited the opportunities for people to encounter others outside of their existing communities.

Addressing these interlinked concerns with a playful, participatory approach, Wkshps and Studio Pandan have produced Where We Stand Apart (Together), which tries to shift personal behaviours and public space in tandem. This proposal for Berlin’s Tempelhofer Feld (but adaptable to other spaces) encourages people to wear masks by making them cool again.

Interview

    Why did you select the Tempelhofer Feld?

Prem Krishnamurthy: We first tried to think about what we thought were important things to do in public space at this moment – and it’s true that it has a lot to do with the situation in Berlin, and its particular phase in lockdown and in the pandemic. But, at the same time, it’s also a state that other places will get to. It prefigures places in East Asia, where we work on a lot of projects, have already seen.

We started with two core ideas. First, encourage people to wear masks, and make that a fun, cool thing to do. And, at the same time, despite physical distancing, we wanted to try to encourage new connections between people, and to encourage people to move outside of their existing comfort zone and trusted relationships – and meet people who weren’t like them.

With those two ideas in mind, we thought about how we might approach them in terms of changing behaviours and changing space – and Tempelhofer Feld seemed the natural place to tackle. It’s one of Berlin’s premier public spaces – a large, open, post-airport runway, that now is, for the most part, unprogrammed. It offered the most expansive field for us to test out some of those design and behavioural ideas.

Ann Richter: We were thinking of messages on different levels – what you see when you arrive, what you experience with other people especially when you involve the mask, and then having this aerial view – a bigger message.

For the idea of giving out masks, as a part of the ‘gamified’ approach to the space, Tempelhofer Feld is also good because you have only three or four entrances – so you can hand them out at these points.

    Has the use of Tempelhofer Feld changed because of the pandemic – is it different now?

PK: In Berlin, there are still guidelines – when you go into stores you must wear masks, the same as in the subway. But, for the most part, most explicit legal restrictions have opened up, so people are gathering for sports, I have a seen a lot of people gathering in quite large groups and quite close together. So, it can even seem weirdly ‘normal.’

    So how did you approach this brief, then?

PK: For the most part, we tried to take this as a more of a methodology, or potential tool rather than choosing a space that had inherently a lot of constraints in terms of usage. We tried to think of it as a place where you could prototype something like this.

You could also say a large space, maybe not even legible as one public area, one space… you could also apply ideas like this in terms of colour-coding and coding in shape, and also in the playfulness in how someone might participate in something like this.

    And in terms of the words spelt out, do the gain some relevance because of the prevalence of drone (and aerial) photography?

PK: For sure. As Ann said, for us, it was important the project represent this extreme spectrum of scale – from the individual behavioural response to the group dynamics, and inter-group dynamics, then all the way up to the entire field. That kind of multi-scale experience also allows for something to have iconicity – a historical work we talked a lot about was Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson.

AR: This is something we could see in a number different spaces; we weren't thinking ‘from the site’ so to speak, but about the situation in Berlin and what we would like to do to change it in a positive way.

PK: The most interesting moment within this health crisis, for me, was when “flatten the curve” became an idea, and people realised that individual behaviour can have systemic effects. That jumping from the individual to the societal scale is hard to do, and design can make more attractive some behaviours that would be to everyone’s benefit – hence the masks.

If you can hand out masks, what can’t you make those something attractive, that people would want to continue to wear and support the desire to wear?

Chris Wu: That's the whole idea, and why we’re excited about combining the macro-scale and the micro-scale (the masks). In East Asia, even though guidelines don’t require people to wear masks, they still wear them, they have become part of their lives. How do we design something that encourages the wearing of masks, that has an extended function – like, it could code you to a zone in the space or a group based on its design and the design of the other part (the zone or group), creating an interactive relationship.

AR: Yes, our ‘game’ idea was that on the mask you have a part of the shape and pattern, and you get the impulse that you could go to that area, which you could also find on a map. And where coloured zones overlapped you could be encouraged to intermingle.

   And, what does this tell us about the role of ‘design’?

PK: Thinking about design as something primarily about the visual field misses the point that it is ultimately about behaviour, culture, social norms and community norms. For us, we’re trying to get to the core of how people relate to public space, how they relate to each other, and how they deal with distancing in a productive manner that is safe but also generative.