This handout provides a structured template for workshop participants to conduct protocol watching—a systematic practice of observing and analyzing how protocols function in real-world contexts. The material offers concrete methodological guidance for identifying, documenting, and interpreting protocol behaviors and effects.
This worksheet guides participants to identify and document protocol patterns in urban space through a structured template that captures problems, infrastructure, and visual documentation. The tool is part of a larger pattern language project that enables DIY protocol discovery and design in built environments.
Drew Austin
Chenoe Hart presents her Summer of Protocols research project 'Addressable Space,' tracing how built environments are remapped through informational systems — from 18th-century European house-numbering schemes that decoupled addresses from physical geography, to skipped floor numbers and hidden 'mechanical voids' in skyscrapers, to elevators as random-access devices. She argues these spatial protocols reshape human experience much like digital file systems, and calls for 'protocol empathy' — the practice of imagining how built space appears from a protocol's or computer system's point of view.
Chenoe Hart
This issue examines California's wildfire management through the lens of prescribed and wild fires at the wildland-urban interface, tracing how 20th-century fire suppression policies fundamentally contradicted ecological understanding of fire's necessary role in ecosystems. The case study explores combustion as a memory practice and investigates how new tools reshape our epistemological relationship with fire management.
Nathalia Scherer, Jiordi Rosales