These workshops with 360 High School in Lower South Providence explored the relationships between landscape, emotion, ecology, and community.
Participants began by examining how gardens can evoke feeling through sensory observation, expressive drawing, and an “emotional site analysis” .
A collaborative card game then introduced food systems and environmental justice, using role-play to unpack the complex relationships between people, land, and resources.
The final workshops grounded these ideas in local context, with participants mapping pollution and phytoremediation in their neighbourhoods before translating their insights into sectional models that explored scale, space, and ecological design.
Workshop 1: The Garden and Human Emotion
How can garden space create certain feelings of peace, reflection and healing?
How does the utilisation of certain plants (colour & textural quality) create different atmospheres which evoke different feelings?
The next task was to bring the students to the site, the school’s front campus lawn, and have them work on a “Emotional Site Analysis”. This type of analysis can be described as a process of understanding the landscape through feelings and using their senses.
After this analysis, our teachers planned to regroup the students in order to see what the students may have more insight on/curiosity that they weren’t able to notice before this activity.
Workshop 2: Food systems and Environmental Justice
A collaborative card game then introduced food systems and environmental justice, using role-play to unpack the complex relationships between people, land, and resources.
Workshop 3: Pollution and Phytoremediation
The final workshops grounded these ideas in local context, with participants mapping pollution and phytoremediation in their neighbourhoods before translating their insights into sectional models that explored scale, space, and ecological design.