PERSONAL ESSAY

My involvement in the complicated challenge of designing to create a culture of care on Ohio State’s campus has shown me once again the importance of designers in complex public health problems. Collaboration is a buzzword in design, a word that is often thrown around to make a project’s outcomes seem contextually relevant and informed. To think about mental health collaboratively is necessary, but when we inject the problem of improving mental health into a parking garage, it is critical for designers to use scholarly literature to bolster their involvement. On reflection of this semester’s work, our ability to work respectfully and thoughtfully in this particular collaborative the studio was contingent on the following ideas: non-place, transformation, and mindfulness.

Marc Auge’s Nonplaces: An Introduction to Supermodernity was the framework for our collaborative studio to approach designing for parking garages. According to Auge, a non-place is a space that exists only as an intermediary between anthropological places. ” As anthropological places create the organically social, so non-places create solitary contractuality “. (94) This contractuality reduces humans from people to highly surveyed individuals. Parking garages are perfect examples of non-places: people only use them as a means to get somewhere else: to a meeting, class, or campus tour. Garage visitors buy entrance passes that are tied to their car’s license plate. The garage itself has no meaning to the visitors, except that it poses the threat of charging them more money if they leave their car too long. Paying customers’ identities are not relevant to the garage, their parking pass is. If anyone else enters the garage without parking there, simply to walk through it, they are not important to the garage at all. They are walking through a dark, cold, concrete structure to get somewhere meaningful. A human entering the garage without parking in it becomes obsolete, and that is perhaps one reason Ohio State’s campus parking garages have repeatedly been sites for suicides by jumping. 

Perhaps the people who go to parking garages view them as anthropological places are people who work in garages to collect tickets, do maintenance, etc. Garage workers might see the garage as a place where they can talk to coworkers, listen to their own music, and earn income. Besides those few folks, garages treat its visitors as if they are void of identity, culture, and mental illness. If the garage treated visitors as people, it would be categorized as an anthropological place on Ohio State’s campus, much like the rooftop terrace at Knowlton, Mirror Lake, or The Oval. 

The goal of our collaborative studio is to convert parking garages on Ohio State’s campus from non-places into anthropological places. A garage as anthropological the place has new purposes other than storage location for dormant cars. Creating an anthropological place will not automatically improve visitors’ mental health or reduce suicides, but the research efforts of our studio members show that there is promise our efforts will at the very least create a culture of care. The “Expert Workshop” conducted prior to the collaborative studio resulted in an important strategy to prevent suicides: distract people in that moment, and connect them to themselves, resources, or a community. This advice is essentially a formula for creating an anthropological place, and the conjectures we arrived at in this studio are promising methods to achieve our goal.

The personal goal of this studio’s members was to be mindful throughout this process. Understanding our own thoughts, feelings, and biases was essential to approaching this studio’s sensitive and highly personal topic. While Auge does not go in detail about mindfulness in his book, his skepticism of supermodernity is related to people’s collective lack of mindfulness and the way non-places worsen it. That said, this project needed to be executed by mindful designers. Beginning this course with a group-guided meditation was a symbolic precedent, and as we end with such successful solutions, it seems as if our members carried mindfulness in their work the entire way.