I was invited to attend this year's SCU+MIT workshop, an annual collaboration between MIT and Soochow University in Taipei, Taiwan. SCU flew 18 MIT students out to Taipei and put them up for 10 days of intensive work designing interventions for three different sites in Taipei (the Shilin Night Market, the Meiti Riverside Park, and the Taipei metro).

Our flight there went via Tokyo; the JFK -> Tokyo arc took us right over Canada and Alaska, titillating my obsesssion with taiga.

Denali from the airplane

Meandering streams

Sunset glow under clouds

The perpetual sunset lasted us for the last half of our west-bound trip, concluding with a dramatic wash of color over Mt. Fuji as we landed in Tokyo.

The workshop was a flurry of activity, 10 days crammed with intensive struggles at communication, decision making, brainstorming, and critique. A rapid introduction to the architectural crit process (rapid design towards frequent presentations with whithering critiques) combined with a lesson in cultural differences in expectations for faculty/student hierarchy (professors who were given special treatment, insulated from contact with students, and engaged in critique by making assertions from high rather than engaging in mutual discussions).

On my team, I was the only one ignorant of Chinese, but also the only one with strong English (everyone spoke a bit of English, but struggled at times). Since the workshop was conducted in English (a fact that felt a bit uncomfortably colonial to me), I had the awkward position of being the spokesperson of the group while also having some difficulty in engaging and communicating fluently with the members of my team. Gracious efforts in accomodating language and frequent tireless translation work by the team members with better English helped us to talk, and we even managed to get something approaching a consensus decision making process going.

After several stumbling starts, my team settled chose to develop an intervention for the Meiti Riverside Park. Our final concept was for a large scale public art installation consisting of thousands of lights placed across the park and river. The lights contain motion sensors, and respond to people or vehicles passing, affecting a simulation of fish swimming around the light field – lights turning on and off representing the position of flocking fish. My task was writing a fully functioning simulation of the entire installation.

The simulated fish are of 3 different types: pushers, chasers, and schoolers. The schoolers flock together, and run away from disturbances, and can be seen dancing through the grassy fields or swarming over the water. The pushers act like logs, and don't move unless you bump into them. The chasers are attracted to disturbances and follow you around if you get close enough to one.

Our final presentation:

All of the presentations are available on youtube. A big thank you to SCU and especially my group members Sky, Lisa, Shuo, Amy, Cicada and Chloe for showing me a wonderful time.