This past Friday our class was tasked with meditating on the site by choosing a spot to sit in for two to three hours and recording everything that happened while we were there, no matter how miniscule. I chose a spot on the bank of one of the dredged ponds (see above) and recorded changed in the site during that time period, as well as every static detail that I could find.
Indeed it was a meditative task, as I was forced to focus on small things, keeping my senses acutely tuned to any change. Because the park had recently been flooded, I noticed some larger-scale changes as well, such as trees inundated with water and a greater accumulation of water than I had seen before. The meditation also caused me to question the time scale at which we were tasked with viewing the site. How does a site change over a period of two hours as opposed to two years, two-hundred years, or two minutes?
When designing for the human scale, we need to think about all time scales. Unless the world is ending in 2012, we should design with the future in mind, and with a time scale of an order of magnitude, as well as designing for the time scale of the present.
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