#londonslostrivers

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Since my previous post, my group and I have met twice, ideating on the subject to choose for our collective smart cities project. The first session featured an enormous stack of books and an equally enormous variety of potential subjects: power dynamics, nature and the city, urban animals were just some of the overarching themes we discussed. Even though our smart city could be located anywhere, we were fast zooming in on London, not just due to its familiarity and easy access, but also because London offered us incredible opportunities in terms of its complexity and contextual richness.

Image: A photograph of the books our group discussed at our first ideation session

The subjects that I found the most appealing involved abandoned and hidden spaces, especially ones with darker undertones. True to the spirit of my first blog post, I talked with passion about London’s underground graveyards and about the fact that here in this city, you never quite know what’s under your feet. The image below shows a snippet of our group Miro board showing the theme of time - where plague pits, memory and death have all found their home. 

Image: A snippet of our group Miro board

Another prominent theme was space, our group’s chosen umbrella term for an array of possibilities from regulated skies to underground rivers. The latter are a special interest of mine - I have done a project on north London’s lost river Moselle some years ago. While doing research on it back in the day, I discovered that Moselle used to flow directly underneath the street I lived on at the time, in Crouch End. I remember wondering how my neighbours would have felt if they knew this - would they be in awe? excited? horrified? concerned that the old lost river could somehow devalue the price of their expensive Edwardian homes?.. 

Image: My old poster describing the lost river Moselle in north London and its existing and possible relationships with public spaces and Tube stations. (The original article with a higher resolution image is available here)

Image: London Under, the brilliant book by Peter Ackroyd, with a large section on London’s lost rivers

In the classroom session that followed, we were urged to recognise that who we are and how we relate to the world depends on what tools we have available, both as users of technology and as designers. Of course, the bias of the researcher, observer and designer is something that traditional HCI is acutely aware of, and often tries to eliminate. Yet, to what extent is it really possible? What if, instead of pretending to be unbiased, the designer dives right in and accepts bias as part of their creative process? As designers, my group is already prejudicing certain choices over others, and my personal experience and interests are already shaping our creative direction. Further, as users of technology, we could expand on the HCI concept of the task-artefact cycle to claim that we are changed by the technology as much as the technology is changed by us. In the context of my earlier thoughts on the multi-layered smart city, this interdependent relationship could be key in how the new layer of smart city technology will slot into the existing historic context of London, with its already existing interdependencies, both overt and hidden. 

During the same session, we were considering the role of stories in design. Rather than being stories that are fabricated by the designer (as illustrated by the ivory tower examples from my second blog post), they are instead uncovered through letting in those, whom the design is for. To allow for this letting in to happen, it may be necessary to shake off the traditional user-centred design approach favoured in HCID which, in the words of Daniela Rosner in her book Critical Fabulations, focusses on “individualism, objectivism, solutionism and universalism.” Instead, Rosner offers an alternative approach of “alliances, recuperations, interferences and extensions.” The concept of recuperations in particular stresses the importance of absent narratives: “What histories of practice have been suppressed or elided?” Whose voices are missing? This slotted in with my earlier ponderings on the lost histories that lie under our feet. 

The following weekend I attended the William Blake exhibition at Tate Britain. His work, infused with the powerful motifs of underworld and death, deeply moved me and further reinforced my focus on these themes for our project. Blake had lived his entire life in London and had rarely left its bounds, his work ingrained in the context of the eighteenth and nineteenth century London. 

Image: Illustration from the book Complaint, and the consolation, or, night thoughts, 1797, by William Blake. Open at pp.54-5

A very obvious absent narrative haunted me throughout the exhibition - that of Blake’s wife, Catherine. There was a drawing of her at the beginning of the exhibition, alongside a brief piece of text explaining her involvement in Blake’s work, such as engraving, colouring and practical support. 

Image: Catherine Blake, c.1805, by William Blake

Another, much more poignant piece of text later on in the exhibition, explained that Blake’s Pilgrim’s Progress was purposefully ignored by scholars for many years because it was known that Catherine had been directly involved in producing the series, and that “her creative and practical influence is only beginning to be fully appreciated.” Catherine’s story resonated with me deeply, making me wonder how much of her absence could be reconstructed at this point in time. Could today’s scholars read between the lines and re-imagine her, in the full depth she deserves, using today’s technology? 

The image below is a brief attempt to encapsulate my frame of mind and my preoccupations over that week, in a data visualisation format. I counted the number of times the themes of underworld and death have come up in my personal life over the course of the previous seven days, and then plotted them on a graph, turned upside down to reinforce the effect of its ‘underworld-ness’. Initially spurred by our group discussions, the frequency of these themes ebbed and flowed, taking a ‘deepwater dive’ - 14 mentions of underworld, 14 mentions of death - on the day of the William Blake exhibition. 

Image: My data visualisation of my previous week’s preoccupations, illustrating the number of times per day I documented the themes of underworld and death.

During our second group meeting, I discovered that some members of my group had been thinking in parallel, getting progressively fascinated by similar subjects. One group member had become engrossed in the subject of digital graveyards: the strange situations that arise when a relationship has come to an end, or when someone has passed away, yet that person’s digital presence is still palpable. I jumped immediately on that idea, not just because it had relevance to my own design thinking so far, but also because the subject resonated with me on a personal level.

So our group talked about how death was a taboo subject in our everyday lives, and how art and literature served as ways to bridge that indescribable void.