About Site Impressions in Sustainable Landscape Design

This CFI project, arranged as a network activity, gathered teachers, students, researchers and practitioners with interest in urban landscapes and their design. In this network activity we explored how site impressions, connecting embodied poly-sensual experience to critical reflection, can become recognized to contribute to creating sustainable urban landscapes.

The overall objective of the project is to strengthen collaboration and knowledge exchange in the subject field of landscape design at the LAPF and SOL departments, and make design work at SLU more visible. Furthermore, our ambition is to initiate conversations with other universities for inspiration and knowledge exchange supporting design research at SLU, and shed light on the potential for a more long-term capacity building initiative, here suggested as a “Forum for reflective practice and design research”.

The project builds on prior initiatives, such as series of workshops held at the SLU Landscape Days on design research, and the LTV report Landscape design based on research (Jansson, Vicenzotti, Diedrich, 2019).

Two workshops were arranged within this CFI-project, one in Alnarp and one in Ultuna. Student work was discussed from a perspective of teaching and research.

Workshop 1+2 (pdf)

The outcomes of the project include:

• The establishment of a network of teachers, researchers, students and practitioners with interest in reflective practice and landscape design research, deepening contacts and exchange between LAPF and SOL, strengthening the design subject at SLU.
• A concrete proposal for a “Forum for reflective practice and design research” at SLU Landscape, as a long term capacity building initiative, to keep this transdisciplinary design research network as a continuos resource, evolving vocabulary, methodology, pedagogy, communication and collaboration, within SLU Landscape.
• A website documenting experiences from the network activity, as a living document to be updated continuously. The material collected is thought to be elaborated into a publication on design research, as one of the start-up tasks within the “Forum for reflective practice and design research”.

Main contact: Victoria Sjöstedt, LAPF

Engagement:
Gunilla Lindholm, LAPF
Malin Eriksson, SOL