Keywords: "Projects" (5×)action (1×)Communication (1×)Design (3×)Dokumentation (7×)Expertinnen des Alltags (1×)matters of form (3×)medium (4×)Minimal Structure (1×)notation (3×)planning (2×)problematisation (1×)Rothenburgsort (1×)stadtteilöffentlich (1×)Uncertainty (1×)
Dominique Peck has joined the Research and Teaching Programme Urban Design’s academic staff at HafenCity University in 2015. Being a UD alumni, his work has a focus on project management, design development and transposing formats in research, teaching and practice. Dominique was co-project managing the live project Building a Proposition for Future Activities and is now focused on his PhD Project Re-positioning Project Management in Urban Design.
Bernd Kniess is an architect and urban planner. Since 2008 he is Professor for Urban Design at HafenCity Universität Hamburg where he established the Master Programme Urban Design. He is interested in the negotiation of the contemporary city, whose planning principles he aims to diagrammatically describe and transfer into a relational practice as procedure.
In the project structuring phase 0 you as the project manager have to mediate or sell your not yet completed project to involved actors. Products such as a brochure, leaflet or prospectus gather the necessary information briefly and concisely and can be brought into play as media to gain access to decisive project management arenas. These products can be summarized under the term exposé. On this page, the exposé is to be laid out on its theoretical-conceptual foundations in the Modes of Play practical form.
About column A
We have already learned in the theoretical-conceptual basics of the e-Learnring arrangement Project Management in Urban Design that the exposé is part of the semantics respectively supports exploring all kinds of uncertain aspects of a yet undone project in the iterative phases (A) coming into play and (B) how to play.
Writing an exposé is an intermediate step in a project. Often it is practical or necessary to acquire further resources and to communicate the undone project with the aim of realisation and the potentials arising through it. Even if the exact allocation of phases and scopes of services at the beginning of a project is vague, we can locate the exposé as part of the project conception. The project exposé summarizes all notations in relation to the project motif at a time set in the extended project team and provides an overview of the content of the project and how you want to implement it over time. It serves to present the project in its present and future aspects and should orient the motivated or still to be motivated actors in the uncertainty of the project conception.
In what relation and position to the field do you write an exposé?
Depending on the addressees and situation in or vis-à-vis a project, the content and formal centralities may differ. Before and during the writing of an exposé, it makes sense to consider who the exposé is aimed at and what exactly you want to achieve with it. On the one hand, avoid working towards a “smallest common denominator” or writing your project or the motif in “simple language” or even in the language of other actors, and on the other hand avoid arguing in the sense of an avant-garde that only keeps itself alive by not really opening up what drives or is supposed to drive it and others. It seems obvious to describe the projected aspects of your project in the way you plan to carry them out.
The exposé should provide a framework for the articulation of the project motif for all foreseeable and unforeseeable situations in the project conception for the actors and aspects of the project still to be motivated. Similar to exposés on ethnographic research studies, an exposé has to fulfil four functions: explorative, explanatory, descriptive and enabling (cf. Creswell 2005). Reduce the guesswork around your project. At the beginning of a project there are not only the factors location, project idea and chapter (AHO 2006, 91), but a reflective and questioning process, which is finally synthesized in the form of a motif. Here, too, it is worth looking at the process of projecting ethnographic research projects in order to come into play. What we in Project Management in Urban Design call the motif is transposed into the research question. “Good questions do not necessarily produce good research, but poorly conceived or constructed questions will likely create problems that affect all subsequent stages of a study” (Agee 2009, 431). After initial and always provisional notations of your motive or interest, “projective participants or actors are sometimes invited to participate in the formulation of research questions, especially in participatory action research. All stakeholders - those whose lives are affected by the problem under investigation (problematization) - should be involved in the process of investigation” (Stringer 2007, 11). Studies that are “reciprocal” (Lawless 2000) or “collaborative” (Lassiter 2005), in which a researcher collaborates with the participants as co-researchers in order to help shape representations, correspond much more to an understanding of urban production.
How can we write an exposé without knowing about the necessary actors and resources, and without having discussed them with the actors? Here the idea of the motive seems to offer a certain workaround: As a project manager, you are involved in an evolving urban situation. The articulation of this integration into the project world enables the structural orientation of your project work in the process. For the time being, it centers what is at stake in the relationship between process and product - for you and other actors involved. This interacts at all times with the assemblage of the urban situation around a concern that brings the fragile and brittle aspects of a situation into the focus of the project manager, especially at the beginning of projects - the project structuring phase. It is advisable that we de-psychologize the motive aspect: We do not see it as a causal telos, but as a structural hub, as a structural anchor and driver of a process. It is therefore an affective structure that introduces a movement vector but remains subject to change.
“Have meaningful conversations about writing life” (Adams 2008, 188). These conversations should certainly begin with the formulation of research questions, but can take place during and after the research process. The answers are seldom simply available in the field. Your exposé should also highlight relevant aspects of a situation and thus enable it to be problematized. The project manager is expected to actively and reciprocally translate between the current situation and the project.
Takeblatt "Expose". Dominique Peck und Marius Töpfer, Lehr- und Forschungsprogramm Urban Design, HCU Hamburg, 26. November 2018. CC BY-SA 4.0
Take Exposé
Write one to three pages of text, schedule and representation of the project on site.
Orient yourself on the following structure.
(0) Project title
A) Locate (1) your project in the urban initial situation. (2) Your motive and the (3) research question are at the beginning.
B) In the next paragraph, show your strategic hypothesis, the theoretical and methodological approach and the current state of research and practice.
C) Operationalizations of methods, tools, theory and discourse follow in the form of an overview of research data and production plans.
Interconnect the planning, execution and documentation of the project with the services still to be performed.
D) Name the formats that come into play in the four iterative phases of the modes of play practice form.
Adams, Tony E. 2008. “A Review of Narrative Ethics.” Qualitative Inquiry 14 (2): 175–194. doi:10.1177/1077800407304417.
Agee, Jane. 2009. “Developing qualitative research questions: a reflective process.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 22 (4): 431–447.
AHO e.V., Eds. 2006. “Interdisziplinäres Projektmanagement für PPP-Hochbauprojekte.” AHO Schriftenreihe 22. Berlin: Bundesanzeiger Verlag.
Creswell, John. 2007. Qualitative inquiry and research design. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Lassiter, Luke Eric. 2005. The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo3632872.html.
Stringer, Ernest. 2007. Action Research. Los Angeles: Sage. https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/action-research/book236795.
