Following Others: Lessons from Sophie Calle's Suite Vénetienne
This essay considers the implications of a hyperactive or highly personal surveillance project for information gathering in public design. Inspired by a close reading of Sophie Calle's book project, Suite Vénetienne (1980, reprinted 2015), in which the artist spent several days surreptitiously following an acquaintance around Venice, the essay considers the limits of our abilities as designers to understand the motivations and desires of the occupants of our spaces. The essay advocates for daring, investment, messiness, and personal risk in attempting to observe and understand the public, while at the same time acknowledging that the assumptions, abstraction, and distance typical of design practice when considering its publics has its merits and uses.
To accompany the essay, I spent several hours following people around in San Francisco, and documented this activity in a series of black and white photographs.
The essay and photographs were published in Ground Up Issue 06: Of Process (2017)