Micheal Williamson:

Currently lost in a mental field, Micheal can see the horizon, but is not exactly sure what is between his current position and the next landscape typology. Exploring what his place is within the context of health in the profession of Landscape Architecture is ongoing and evolving. Wandering between the thought processes of ‘everything I do is rooted in improving health’ and the daydreaming notion that ‘he is making up stories about the shapes of clouds while only the meteorologist can explain the why and how the individual shapes exists’…but his feeling is that removing the stories and characters of the clouds is joyless. Further choreographing and balance needs to occur to help unfold the tale.  

Micheal’s ongoing journey is circling around the development of experiments surrounding his research question. Landing on a few key identifiers to link his future experiments, he is trying to identify if any measurement metrics are to be used between the disparate experimental processes. The current list of ‘identifiers’ include; Education, Communication (visual, oral, and written), Advocacy, Collaboration (inside and outside of his practice), and how the experiment is integrated into my practice of Landscape Architecture. 

His current experiments are exploring how to communicate his knowledge of how Landscape Architecture can impact the health of people, community and the environment - working within a large global practice, he is exploring the practice of big practice through spreading this knowledge and his research findings across his global team.  This is Micheal’s journey through the mental landscape he is continually developing to illustrate his own personal landscape. 

Underlying all of this work is the development of a process to integrate research within the Landscape Architectural practice and exposing it to the practice community at his office – commencing with his own work and concurrently trying to collaborate with the remaining 225 landscape professionals at his firm. With the goal of shifting the notions of what practice based research is, and with any luck, uncovering current and future research needs – which may or may not be related to landscape and health.

Approaching his experiments from various perspectives, Micheal has been walking around his metaphorical mental landscape, exploring and curating the associations within it, at which point he will identify his transect journeys through the map.  Walking towards and through the problem, Micheal is immersing himself into his curated landscape spaces, unearthing a walking vocabulary to be used and applied to his work and experimental framework.  

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