SITUATION situating practices and research Symposium & Exhibition | RMIT Interior Design | Design Hub, Melbourne, Australia | July – August 2014 | idea-edu.com 66 S I T U A T I N O SITUATION Paper Presentation Rosie Scott PhD Candidate, School of Architectur Design, RMIT University Rosie is reelance interior designer, watercolour painter, PhD candidate, and part-time teacher o terior design. Her PhD research explores the social and spatial implications o espons e interior design practice with spec attention to watercolour painting as an interior practice and a ‘practice care . Since graduatin rom the Interior Design program at RMIT in Rosie has combined working pro essionally at practices such as Six Degrees and Geyer with teaching at RMIT, along with working as an occasional research assistant, and writing about architecture and design r publications including The Age and Dwell. In both her design and teaching practices, Rosie is interested in exploring the ways in which interior design/architecture works at the intersection o patial, atmospheric and social conditions. Rosie is in tigating the beli that the care l consideration o ese relationships, combined with the nuances o pec interior skills, tactics and mediums, o ers up great potentia r the ld to make a pos e and unique contribution to the quality o ur es and en ironments. rosie@rosiedoes.com www.rosiedoes.com situation (beyond): watercolour as an interior practice of care To define ‘interior’ – either with the literal understanding as the inside of something, or with a more open definition as a set of relations and conditions – is to position interior relative to something else. Interior is always a relational condition. The Oxford Dictionary of English describes ‘interior’ (in adjective form) as ‘situated on or relating to the inside of something’, so an interior is situated in a context, and therein produces a situation. If we then consider interior as relative, situational, how might this consideration be useful to affect an approach? How can we practice interior design relationally? This last question is too broad to explore in this context (and perhaps the answer is ‘we already do’) so here I will introduce one kind of interior practice – watercolour painting – that operates relationally in a sensitive and attentive way. Watercolour can be a design tool, method, and tactic, but also a production, duration, response, and engagement and, as such, has the potential to address the nuances of situation in a careful way. To study a site (or a scene, a space, a situation?) through watercolour requires an engagement between what is being studied and the studier. Something new is produced in this durational process: a situation or a relation. I have used watercolour in various formal ways in my interior design practice over the years, but the consideration of its potential and affect as a method came out of a research project I have been involved in since 2008. The project, titled ‘Beyond Building’, with collaborators Suzie Attiwill and Gregory Nicolau, looks at protective care environments – specifically, government housing for children and young people who are taken into protective care due to abuse or neglect. Much of this research has taken place through RMIT undergraduate Interior Design studios addressing the interior environments of protective care houses. In one of these studios in 2010, students visited four protective care houses and, afterwards, were left feeling overwhelmed and somewhat creatively frozen by the number and intensity of the problems that were present there. As an attempt to get students to engage differently with the environments I conducted a watercolour workshop in which they produced studies from photographs they took on site. The shift in approach was notable; The students appeared to open up their thinking in response to the site, moving away from a reactionary problem solving approach to something more sensitive to the nuances and relations present within the site. These studies formed part of a ‘situation study’ brief, which was a reworking of the traditional site analysis, aimed to foreground the relational, programmatic and temporal qualities of site.