Defined by deviations: the Traveling Transect as a bodily research approach to appropriate and disseminate places

Abstract

Based on a Travelling Transect approach, this paper explores how ample interpretations and opportunities for new thoughts about sites are developed, especially when these sites are explored along a combined material and immaterial predefined linear path that is distorted, challenged and redefined by bodily encounters and sensations on site. By using the Travelling Transect as an approach to do research and develop new understandings of sites, possible overlooked qualities manifest themselves in a series of registrations collected or inspired by encounters on site. Illustrated through a design research study around the Öresund strait, researchers exemplify how data becomes unlocked and re-interpreted through the approach. In short, the aesthetic values identified in a map, in a geometry or a static composition are displaced by the approach to values connected to an experience of site’s audio or material surroundings, time-space relations and on-site reflections and sensations connected to movement.