Initial Workshop Insights
Initial Workshop Insights from the Brunswick and Melbourne Workshop’s.
Moodboard’s at the Brunswick Workshop 2022. Image: RMIT PlaceLab.
- Wayfinding and placemaking: The route taken and the sense of getting lost were other common themes impacting participants’ moodboards. The feeling of being lost aroused different moods amongst the participants but was commonly reflected in chaotic shapes and paths within their moodboards. This lack of order in their travels resurfaced in the vernacular of keywords chosen to summarise their moodboards.
- Textures, representation and non-representational: Given the option of pens and markers, coloured paper, transparency, cellophane, printed images of textures, many participants opted for use of the cellophane, often scrunching it to varying degrees to depict different moods. Moreover, participants largely avoided literal depictions or words to express their ideas and mood, engaging more so with different made and sourced textures. This might suggest that it is easier for some participants express these ideas through texture and tactility (particularly where words might feel limiting).
- Collaborative visualization: Compared to language-based discussions: Groups exhibited the ability to generate productive and meaningful moodboards together without prior experience of moodboarding or knowledge of each other. In discussing how they felt about the experience, many people described the process of working with non-representational visual materials enabled them to collaborate without worrying about the exactness or accuracy required in group discussions. They also seemed capable of producing sensible and visually legible moodboards in short periods of time. Both these outcomes of the work- shop suggest that nonverbal means of producing mood information may bypass some of the limitations of finding and then agreeing on verbal or language-based responses to questions.