It was difficult knowing where to begin with actually writing a manifesto of my own. I went back through part one and two and wrote down the things that I had been interested in such as comfort/discomfort, confrontation and how spaces design an experience or emotion. I knew I wanted to write something that came across less serious to counteract the sense of confrontation that had been present in part two but still get the point across.
My initial ideas were a perfect flatmate checklist, a letter on how to behave socially, what I said vs what I said in my head, a letter to the people sharing my space.
The above manifestos were all handwritten to begin with before being tidied up and put into a digital format. A notebook with lines scribbled out and layouts changed over and over, nothing really clicked. I didn’t feel any of these really conveyed what I wanted them too so again I went back to considering my part two intervention. It was handwritten, it felt personal, the comments were specific to us and our household but others could also relate, it had a sense of humour in the ridiculousness of some of the comments made and it had no filter. I had also picked up that at times we are inauthentic in our response in a social space. We edit our words and consider what we say to not rock the boat. We moderate our emotions and everything is just more considered in a social space compared to a private space. It’s not something we purposely put on but rather something we take away from our usual behaviours. My intervention in part two was aimed at getting people out of their comfort zone and confronting our behaviours and actions and I wanted my manifesto to have this same power.
I think perspective is important in my manifesto as well as one of the main things when living in a shared environment is that everyone does has different perspectives on things. What is clean to someone else might be messy to me so there will always be clashes. But perhaps this could feed into the ridiculousness of the manifesto. By being so specific and picking up on silly annoyances it shows that the perspective is mine but maybe others will relate to certain aspects of it too.
With this idea I mind I revisited something to similar to my first ideal flatmate list and developed it into my final manifesto through a few iterations of list size, layout and order, reading as a advert instead of a checklist. I made it longer and exhausting to read, a list of annoyances that goes on and on getting more specific and absurd as you go. When you first live with someone the things that annoy you are very general, the kind of things that would annoy most people but as you get to know them better or live with them longer the more specific and silly these annoyances get. The little things grow bigger and take on a life of their own and this manifesto makes this idea more prominent. I wanted it to be handwritten, allowing the frustration these complaints generate to be physically shown through the size or line weight or pressure of the pen on the paper, maybe the ink bleeds where i’ve pressed to hard or too long in anger.
In the end I finally had a manifesto that I feel represented what it was I had been investigating throughout the three projects and captured elements of some of my favourite manifesto I had looked at to begin with.
Spatial Design 
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