Plant Hotels: designing the imaginary foundations of communities

ABSTRACT

Communities can be a significant source of well-being. Design literature has recently paid attention to social design and social innovation and has advanced our understanding of designing for communities in many ways. One thing that has been left to the sidelines has been those imageries that shape communities. They are usually seen but unnoticed, but important in their consequences. This paper builds on Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology to explicate some of these imageries through a series of four Plant Hotels in Helsinki and one in Stockholm. Inspired by relational art they were meant to explore community-formation with minimal rules. They were treated as breaching experiments that led us to classify the imageries into four main orientations. The paper discusses how these imageries create a web of assumptions that create and maintain communities and make them robust, and how they can be turned into design material that helps us to reimagine communities.

KEYWORDS:

• Imagery
• community
• social design
• voluntary action
• ethnomethodology

Acknowledgments

We want to thank Aoi Yoshizawa who worked together with the first author in Plant Hotels 1 and 3 and Finnish Cultural Foundation for supporting this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Suomen Kulttuurirahasto [Doctoral research].