The documenters – for loss of a better word – were charged with collating information from and recording key moments of work by the nine student groups and their tutors participating in the Four Days on the Outside Project.
For the project workers, the briefs given to them, required a look from the concrete territory of their engagement with urban environments in Belfast and Derry to the inside of their chosen future professional field.
As documenters, in order to fulfil our tasks, we had to bring the fresh view and distance of an outsider to the project with which to look at the different briefs, intentions at play, strategies available or to be developed and their prospective results. A move from the inside of the discipline to the outside and situatedness of the activity was required.
But ‘first things first’: the following issues had to be clarified?
These questions also formed the starting point for the discussion between us and the web designers: Fällt in collaboration with Studio Tonne. It was agreed that to document the milestones of each project the emphasis should be laid on significant visuals including photographs, short video clips, graphs and mind maps rather than large amounts of explanatory text.
To select and arrange the material, the documenter group had to define and adopt a unified editorial position (as opposed to the abstract neutral observer). A structure was developed and continuously reflected during the process of generating and editing the material to be processed by the web designers.