Dahoon Lee

Door to Dirt

Date

04 OCT 2024 17 OCT 2024 (2 Weeks)

Spatial · Installation

What does it mean to experience dirt, and who gets to decide what a city classifies as “filth”? Our group explored graffiti, often framed as urban dirt, as a way to examine the boundary between public space and private ownership. Using the object of a “door”, we experimented with how choice and territory are sensed and negotiated.

A Door That Doesn’t Belong

We asked: how can graffiti help us interrogate the line between publicness and private property? Why is some graffiti accepted as art, while other marks provoke discomfort? What standards, explicit or implicit, shape those judgements?

Dirt, or Boundary?

We analysed graffiti-marked spaces using the AEIOU framework to structure actions, context, and user responses. We then formed a working hypothesis: graffiti becomes “a problem” not simply because of aesthetics, but because it can be read as crossing into a shared or someone else’s territory.

Based on the door’s particular role as an object that connects spaces and symbolises permission and passage, we set our direction around making boundary and choice more visible through interaction.

The core of the graffiti debate is less about aesthetics and more about boundaries, ownership, and choice. A door offered a useful way to surface people’s attitudes through what they decide to allow, keep, or remove.

The Door as a Choice Machine

A door is placed here. We explored the graffiti experience by running an experiment where users “collect” marks in whatever way they choose.

We installed a door with existing graffiti and presented participants with a scenario: “You are moving into a new space.” We observed their choices, whether they would remove, add to, or keep the marks.

Because the existing markings strongly influenced responses, we built a blank door and moved it across different locations to collect new graffiti. By comparing the collected markings and participants’ reactions, we examined how different people interpret boundaries and how they form criteria for what feels acceptable.

What We’d Push Further

One piece of feedback stayed with me: we could have pushed the work further by applying a “negative” approach, thinking through the reversal of our premise. Rather than stopping at collecting graffiti, we could have explored exclusion and purification more directly, for example by asking, “Is there any mark you would want to remove?”

That step might have made the project more provocative and analytically useful, expanding it from documentation into a clearer exploration of judgement, discomfort, and the politics of shared space. I intend to keep these methods in mind for future projects.

Credits

UX Design

Dahoon Lee
Aslı Ateş
Uday Goel
Wuyou Xiang
Yulanxi Jiang (Lancy)

Mentored by

Alaistair Steele
Tonicha Child

Project Journals

UX of Dirt Week 1Traces and Choices
10 OCT 2024

UX of Dirt Week 2Traces on the Door
17 OCT 2024