Design a Haunting Intervention

Getting Spectral

As a final part of this workshop, you'll imagine an intervention to welcome a haunting into your chosen site. This intervention could be a memorial, an artistic performance, artifact, alterations to the built environment, or mediated experience. This workshop applies a tool of citizen design. Typically used in urban planning, citizen design is a process of inviting community feedback about potential structures, policies, and practices in neighborhoods and cities. It means equipping people with design tools and offering them an outlet for publishing their ideas.

To develop our own design process, we borrowed from the work of Monument Lab on re-monumentalizing Philadelphia. We also took inspiration from the Cooper Hewitt Museum's Citizen Process Lab: Citizen Design. With our methodology, we aim to reposition haunting as not just a mythology, tourist attraction, or short-lived sensation. Rather, by deploying a design intervention, haunting becomes a force that can be mobilized for ethical purposes. A haunting can reveal omitted figures and require publics to look closely at the social institutions and discourses that shape our engagement with a historical site.

Rhodes College’s Clough-Hanson Gallery presents prototypes from Monument Lab. Photo by Chip Pankey.

Welcoming the Ghost / Designing a Haunting Intervention

Citizen Design Protocol

We've created a protocol for designing a Haunting Intervention. Go ahead and click on the Google Doc.

Or, just go here to get to the protocol.

It's a "View Only" Google Doc. So, you'll need to make a copy and then add your own content! Click on "File" > "Make a copy" > and Save to your Google Drive.

First / Determine your Ghost(s)

In the first part of the protocol, jot down your chosen site name, location, and the ghosts that you'd like to invite into the site.

Second / Choose a Citizen Design Tactic

Next, select a design tactic. We created a list of tactics. A tactic could be physical, like a building or a statue. It could also be experiential, like a walk or a dialogue. It could be political, like a civic call to action or a campaign or a digital intervention like an series of Instagram stories. It might also be ephemeral, like a spell or a performance.

Third / Describe or Sketch Your Haunting Intervention

Now, imagine your haunting intervention with your heart and your head.

Describe or sketch your intervention. No need to have fancy art skills here! We're totally okay with stick figures! You can also insert images or videos. Feel to draw by hand, take a photo, and insert it into the document.

Finally / Share Your Haunting Intervention!

In the Padlet below, please post a screenshot of your Haunting Intervention along with the SITE NAME + LOCATION. No need to sign into the app. Here's a tutorial on how to take a screenshot on a Mac and a PC, just in case.

To contribute, simply click the "+" and "Upload" a .jpeg file of your Intervention.

We can't wait to see what you come up with! Take a screenshot and tag on social media with #NCPH2020 #w9.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse