Drawing waters: creative visual enquiries through riverscapes

Drawing Waters is a series of participatory walks and visual fieldwork exercises developed and executed by the authors, to facilitate engagement with river landscapes. Through walking and drawing together, these events aim to develop discursive tools for the discovery and communication of cultural, political and socio-economic place narratives, identifying this as a key area for development in design research. Importance is placed on ‘thinking through making’ and examining the value of experiential approaches in place research. Using two case studies, outcomes are documented through material captured via physical and digital data resulting in a visual and textual cross section of different river locations. A practical methodology is identified that can be applied to a wide range of research environments and key areas of impact are outlined, including heritage, pedagogy, public engagement, land use and policy making.