Drawing mobile shared spaces: Brighton bench study

Drawing plays many roles in relation to design; recording, reflecting, capturing and creating situations and conditions that are measurable as well as those that are perceived and conceived. Taking inspiration from Appleyard Lynch and Meyer’s The View from the Road (1964), this chapter illustrates the potential of drawing to both ‘capture’ and to interrogate the complex relationship between the design and mobile practices of street space, particularly street environments that have been designed to re-imagine the relationships between walkers, cyclists, car users and others in mobile space. Our examination of a specific shared street space—New Road in Brighton—aims to contribute to ‘new ways of seeing’ the interfaces of design and situated mobilities: movements and their meaning that are contextualised in social and cultural space. We seek to capture how the mobile practices performed within designed street spaces are the means by which built form is known, whether by the moving eye scanning space, by the feel of surface through the feet or via the body of the vehicle, the effort or ease in covering the ‘ground’, or the shifting proximity and arrangement between people and surfaces. In particular, we deploy material from a 24-hour ‘bench survey’ in New Road to investigate these ideas.