NODEM 2014 Proceedings

Confabulated Architecture
Mapping (PMM) for my research, I asked people who had never visited the museum to draw an imaginative
expression, based on the collected text reviews from those who had visited.
I gave the drawing task to 23 participants who were studying or teaching art and design at the Royal College of
Art, and also considered to match gender and age between reviewer and illustrator. There was also a limitation
that they mustn’t look up any related images of Sir John Soane’s Museum to inform their drawing, but draw
only from the symbolic contents through the reading process in combination with their unconsciousness. The
imaginary and symbolic dimensions should bring participants into a ‘realistic illusion’ (Lefebvre, 1991: 29).
Figure 2. Drawing from interviewees and questionnaire paper based on Google Review
The resulting drawings were categorised by exterior and interior of imaginary museum space. A notable feature
was a depiction of the monthly event in which the museum is lit by candlelight. These events cause long
queues due to their popularity.
According to Anusas and Ingold (2013), “Data displays presuppose a world of objective properties that are given
quite independently of the direct sensory engagements through which people perceive and come to know
their surroundings.” This cognitive process for concretising experience about a place thus affects individual
sensory perceptions, and as a result people create an illusion of a place based on Internet searches.
3D printing
My interest in developing tactile experiences as communication modes and interfaces derives from how we
shape our experience in the digital space. Taking a tangible design approach as a further method, I combined
aspects of the drawings in order to create a new, imaginary version of Sir John Soane’s museum. The process
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