Rendering Atmosphere: Exploring the creative glue in an urban design studio

Discussions of the credibility of renderings are continuously brought up in public media. While this focus on effect of the rendering has been widely discussed in research, there is a dawning recognition of the necessity to understand the complex social construction of renderings as a creative process, where the credibility is more on how it feels than what one can merely see on the rendering. For instance, from an ANT-approach, it is argued that renderings create atmosphere by participating in networks of humans, non-humans and places, and so it becomes possible to recognize the rendering process as a practice of power, negotiation and translation. Research has however still to acknowledge the atmosphere that marks the actual rendering process. Based on a phenomenological perspective we highlight how the process is an actual creative process characterized by the transformation of feelings. We show how atmosphere is not only the effect of renderings on an audience but acts as the kit that ties the whole rendering practice together.