Interconnections of living – Interactive DVD as teaching material

Videoclips will make accessible interviews with the residents of selected residential buildings (housing associations, communal and private housing developments in Zurich from the last 100 years) in their apartments. Here residents answer method-based questions during a tour of their apartments. The material, collected and developed in 2008/09 in the framework of an SNF research project at the ETH Wohnforum (headed by Dr. Marie Glaser) will be systematically assembled on an interactive DVD for use in teaching, ordered by themes and buildings. These clips will be deployed in Frau Glaser’s elective lecture course in Module 1, «Gesellschaftlicher Kontext und historische wie soziale Bedingtheit des Wohnens» [The societal context and historical and social relativity of living] from Spring Semester 2010. The cognitive and affective learning objective of the project is to motivate students via example portraits to reflect on their personal biographical involvement with the theme of living, and to draw on this to fruitfully consider the complex interrelationships of living in its public and private, individual dimensions. Students will gain a deeper understanding of the social, economic and era-related conditions of living and will integrate what they learn into their own lives. In this way they will understand living not as a function of inhabiting architectural constructions but in terms of cultural practice.