creativity + the smart city

Ideas about the invisible world beneath the soil have pervaded my thoughts for as long as I can remember. As a child, I read books about the underground homes of animals in books like Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O’Brien and Fantastic Mr. Fox by Roald Dahl.

Fast forward to 2014, when I made the above drawing attempting to visualise an interconnected web of plant roots. This drawing contains a web of India ink and acrylic gesso sprawling across a 2 meter square of thick paper, whose size and depth fail to translate to this tiny digitised version.

But the real physical version of the drawing too felt like it failed to translate my mental picture into physical form— failed to inspire the sense of interconnectedness of my vision, and thus never felt finished. Alas, after a few months of work on my web of roots, I gave up, pulled the pins out of the wall and rolled it up. It found its home in a storage closet with the rest of my rejected artefacts, deemed unworthy of display in my home, and yet somehow still too precious to discard. It has remained rolled up collecting dust ever since.

The unrealised vision for this drawing had begun to inhabit my mind after learning about mycelium and mychorrizae for the first time from mycologists in Eugene, Oregon, where I was living and studying landscape architecture at the time. The video below by ecologist Suzanne Simard summarises the knowledge that gave rise to this vision, explaining the astonishing interconnectedness of communities of trees in forests.

Fast forward again to 2020 when one of my Creativity in Design module leaders put a task to the class to fill out sheets of paper with a series of prompts:

‘when the city was: ___,

what if: ___,

and the city then became: ___.’

Before thinking, I found my hand scrawling a scenario:

‘when the city was: bombed in World War II,

what if: everyone moved underground,

and the city became: a labyrinth of tunnels.’

My classmates found this idea quite dismal; after all, life underground would not involve much light or fresh air, they aptly pointed out. And yet, I remained inexplicably enchanted by the idea of a subterranean metropolis.

Later in the term, when my design team pivoted away from the idea of a ‘game of plant life’ and returned to questions about plant agency and plant communication (explored in my last couple of posts), this underground web resurfaced in my thinking.

We found a book called The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate- Discoveries from a Secret World by Peter Wohlleben and learned more about what he called the Wood Wide Web: networks of tree roots and fungi which serve as an infrastructure for the sharing of information and resources.

As the team brainstormed different ideas, we shifted from the design of a game to the design of a site-specific art installation and honed in on the idea of ‘tiny forests’ or liminal patches of green space dotted throughout the city. The goal, carried through from our work all term but clarified now, involved engendering human empathy for plants, or in other words fostering the connections between humans and plants. Only now, we were in lockdown as a result of COVID-19.

The COVID-19 crisis has had varying impacts on our lives so far, but the most pertinent felt impact for our team at the time was a pervading feeling of isolation. Fortunately, we were able to keep working together thanks to the internet. We reflected on the notions of isolation and interconnection, and the infrastructures of the city (e.g. the world wide web) that foster our connections in absentia.

Meanwhile, we had to choose a site for our intervention that we knew from memory. We chose to explore hubs of connection where roads, train lines, and people come together in physical proximity but are often disconnected, passing by quickly, unaware of their surroundings. Two sites we knew well were Highbury & Islington and Kings Cross. Since we couldn’t visit sites in person, we visited them digitally via Google Earth and Google Images.

We discussed ways that plants communicate and ways that people connect. We brainstormed ideas and sketched them out. We shared concepts in Google spreadsheets. We considered pheromones as one potential concept. Tons of seemingly random ideas and resources were compiled. Among them, I posted a link to a touch-sensitive LED floor while Rosie posted resources about the Wood Wide Web— what if the sidewalk were a giant screen where people could peer into the underground world of plants? Interesting, but perhaps just a passing pretty picture. We moved on.

Gemma was exploring a vision of a concept of a digital ‘mother tree’ and posted an exhibit from Japan with relevant resources to that idea, which happened to use stillness (as opposed to movement) as a triggering interaction. And then, in a blurry flurry of ideation, some dots were connected-- what if, on the digital floor of tree roots & Wood Wide Web, humans standing still triggered an interaction… what if the people grew roots too… that connected to the plants’ roots?!

We continued to explore other ideas, and I sketched various concepts for mini sites within the greater Kings Cross redevelopment. Among them, a tiny forest at Granary Square, where the roots floor vision unfolded in my sketchbook, and then the realisation: ‘Wait. These trees’ roots wouldn’t be connected.’

I knew from my days as a landscape architect that urban trees living amongst pavement are planted in ‘wells,’ which are essentially boxes underground. This made me feel sad. I had a newfound empathy for these isolated plants because of my current isolation during the Coronavirus lockdown.

This reality of tree wells also threatened the vision of an uninterrupted, interconnected web underneath the sidewalks. It would be a lie in most urban spaces.

At the next meeting, we discussed including two sites instead of one and highlighting the juxtaposition of these underground systems. We’ve presented this proposal in a slideshow and produced a document containing a project summary and visual narrative of the design journey.

In the final stages of detailing this design proposal, we connected two more resources, which serendipitously catapulted our concept into a truly radical smart city future.

First, Paul Stamets Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Save The World posits that mychorrizal networks are the ‘neural networks of nature,’ meaning that forests are their own ‘smart cities.’ Stamets also posits that the networks relay vast amounts of information which can be tapped into by humans, and therefore have potential to serve as ‘interspecies interfaces.’

Additionally, the work of Neri Oxman at MIT media lab shows how organic, living matter can be used for building materials among many other innovative uses. Could our internet infrastructures be made of mycelium?

These datapoints led us to expand our vision beyond a world where humans build urban infrastructures in ways that are merely harmonious with plants’ networks. Instead of harmonious but disparate plant and human infrastructures, it is wholly possible that we could share our infrastructural networks with those of plants and fungi.

With this in mind, I’ll leave you with one last thought:

When: humans and plants lived isolated in disconnected boxes,

What if: we came together to merge the world wide web and wood wide web to form one interconnected network,

When we started to consider the concept of plant agency, the questions soon arose: ‘how would plants enact their agency?’ and ‘how would/do plants communicate?’

I’m fascinated and pleased to say that we dug up many answers to these questions. Upon considering these questions, I immediately remembered an episode of the PBS Nature documentary series which has left a lasting impression on me since first viewing it several years ago.

As I mentioned in a previous post, this short documentary film entitled What Plants Talk About explains several ways that plants communicate— one of them being through scent. I will never forget the narrator’s voice explaining that the smell of cut grass, which so many of us love, is actually a ‘chemical scream’ of distress.

The video below offers a more thorough biological explanation of this phenomenon:

The incongruence between the grass’s ‘scream’ and humans’ pleasure in the smell befuddled and disturbed me. Are we humans secretly sadists who like inflicting pain on plants? Honestly even that would be attributing a more sincere (however evil) motivation to us humans.

When it comes down to it, I don’t think we’re sadists; it seems that we actually just don’t know what plants are saying with their olfactory language. And how would we?

Enter technology. Some of us— albeit a niche community of scientists— do know what some plants are trying to say with their smells (or at least have a general clue), thanks to technological sensors they’ve built. Of course it’s possible to build a smart city full of sensors that quantify and translate plant pheromones into communications most humans would understand.

But even if this knowledge became widely disseminated, would people even care? What if the alternative to our potential plant sadism isn’t actually ignorance, but apathy?

Once we possess the technology to sense the ‘voices’ of plants, the question becomes: how do we engender empathy for the perspective of species— indeed kingdoms— far removed from our own very human lenses of understanding and communicating?

In the social sciences, we talk about how meanings and discourses are deeply embedded in specific cultural and physical contexts. In this school of thought, we may reflect upon the ways that our thoughts and behaviours are shaped and even constructed by social and environmental influences.

For example, I was astounded to learn that only a portion of human populations practice kissing as an expression of romantic physical connection. This was surprising to me because the instinct to kiss a person I am attracted to feels so ‘natural’ and ‘automatic’ that I had unwittingly assumed that this practice was common to all human cultures, when in fact it is very culturally specific.

We can take this concept a step further and reflect upon the notion that our thoughts are very much bound to our human forms of language, and our experiences bound to our embodiment in human forms of bodies.

When considering the concept of interspecies relations, we may find it is incredibly difficult to comprehend, let alone empathise, with forms whose bodies and languages are so disparate from our own. We might struggle to find common ground upon which to root our mutual understanding with these other beings. What then, if anything, do we have in common with plants?

Well, believe it or not, we might unconsciously communicate through chemical scents (pheromones), too. In the video below, technologist Poppy Crum presents a TED talk in which she illustrates how humans’ emotions can be monitored through the chemical signatures of our exhales.

In this video, the chemical signatures of a group of humans’ breaths is measured by sensors inside of a theatre, and this information is translated by machine learning algorithms into a colourful cloud, which the humans can watch for realtime biometric feedback to visualise their emotional reactions to a piece of film.

Upon reflection, I thought, ‘this could be the common ground!’ Perhaps if we used sensors to measure and visualise both humans’ and plants’ feelings together, it might be possible to create a sense of kinship with our friends in the flora kingdom.

This idea inspired the below sketch, which shows a patch of land along the canal at the new Kings Cross development, which is beautifully landscaped with swaths of lavender and other flowering perennial plants as well as trees and turf grass. People flock to this patch of earth in nice weather to occupy every last inch of it, and I remember seeing lots of couples sweetly convening on this little plot of green space. The lovely flowers also attract a number of nonhuman visitors to the space, including birds and bees.

A play on the term ‘birds and bees’ holds a double meaning as a title for a site-specific installation at this place. In a literal sense, actual birds and bees are attracted to the space due to plant pheromones released to attract pollinators for their own reproduction. In a metaphorical sense, ‘birds and bees’ is a figure of speech for human romantic love.

The concept illustrated here is that both humans’ and plants’ pheromones would be sensed and creatively presented in tandem, with the aim that this might inspire humans to think differently about our plant friends and the ways they communicate.

Today we presented our concept design so far to the class: a game of plant life based on Monopoly, whose aim was to transform peoples’ attitudes and values about plants in an effort to prolong the plants’ lifecycles.

Lara wisely and critically reviewed our proposal, and raised several issues that questioned our underlying paradigm entirely. First, we claimed to be designing for plants, but were effectively designing for people. Furthermore, the medium of a game risks potentially detracting from the seriousness of the issues at hand, while the specific format of Monopoly reinforces an existing societal paradigm of commodifying plants for human consumption.

Lara also raised the issue of our temporal relationship with plant life, which got me thinking. On the one hand, for annual plants, their lives might only be a season (or in some cases, even days?), whereas for many plants such as most trees, their life expectancy far exceeds humans, while their rates of movement and growth unfold so slowly that these processes are imperceptible to our naked human eyes.

Finally, Lara and Alex both raised the issue of plant agency. When designing for, with, or around plant life, it is important to consider the moral imperative to understand the world from plants’ perspectives (or, given the impossibility of this task, to at least make our best attempts at doing so).

These issues brought me back to three resources, which I had previously come across but reflect upon now in a different light. These are outlined below:

1) The Botany of Desire, book by Michael Pollan & PBS film

Michael Pollan’s book the Botany of Desire offers a hypothesis that most definitely raises the issue of plant agency-- but this time with respect to the way that plants evolve. Or, according to Pollan, the way plants use humans to further their own evolution.

Pollan delves into the evolutionary stories of four plants highly manipulated by humans: tulips, potatoes, apples, and cannabis. The author posits that each of these plants evolved a quality attractive to humans’ desires, such that we would use our ingenuity and technologies to exponentially speed up their evolution. According to this hypothesis, each of these plants have effectively maniupulated us: tulips through their beauty, apples through their sweetness, potatoes through control and cannabis through intoxication.

The book and film ask us to take a macro view into the notion of plant agency and to question our paradigms about power dynamics between humans and plants, asking us to consider: who is manipulating and using whom?

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2) What Plants Talk About, PBS Nature

This television documentary episode discusses the ways that plants communicate amongst themselves and other species. Making use of the aforementioned time-lapse video method, the scientists responsible for the content of this film have discerned very interesting biological information about plants. Namely: they do move. Moreover, they can smell. And they can make smells to communicate with one another.

One of the main methods of plant communication introduced by this film is the concept of pheromones. Narrators inform us that the smell of cut grass loved by so many humans is in fact ‘a chemical scream.’ Even more interesting is the information that parasitic Daughter Vines sniff out their favourite host (tomato plants) and grow towards them.

Overall, the film supports the hypothesis that plants are sentient and communicate with one another, and through various technologies we humans may be able to hack into their communication channels to understand what they are saying.

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3) The Overstory by Richard Powers

Richard Powers’ collection of short stories called The Overstory contains a narrative about a first-generation American immigrant who brings a handful of chestnuts across the country with him and plants them on his Iowa farmstead. Four of the original five chestnut trees die throughout different tribulations in their first years of life, and the farmer decides to start documenting the sole survivor by climbing onto the roof of his house and photographing the tree on the first day of every month.

When the farmer dies, his son continues his father’s tradition. This carries on for several generations, to the point that the act of flipping through the fat collection of printed photographs unfurls a visualization of the life of the tree through seasons of growth and decay over decades. Lacking captions or any sort of explanation from their initiating forefather, the photographers—and in turn, the readers—are left to ponder the meanings of this heirloom ritual.

Alongside the subjects of this story, we wonder about the significance of these farmers’ regular photographic practice, which transforms through the generations yet remains opaque even to its practitioners. We wonder about the meanings of the photographs as surviving artefacts which outlive their creators, carrying unspoken stories heavier than the fragile structures of language might be able to bear.

And so we wonder: what can visualisations communicate that cannot be contained in words? Of course, one might stop with the cliche adage ‘a picture is worth a thousand words,’ or perhaps take it a step further by citing time-lapse videos which illustrate the growth of plants by radically speeding up the progression of frames. In fact, my generation is so habituated to these time-lapse videos that the concept of ‘plant time’ may seem familiar, even boring to them. However, whilst time-lapse videos may convey relevant biological information, we might consider what might be lost by synthetically altering the speed of plants’ processes to fit our own temporal lens?

How might still, printed photographs communicate plant time differently than time-lapse videos? On the one hand, flipping through the photographs reveals the same sort of time-lapse peek into plant time by speeding up years of growth into a few brief seconds of human time. But on the other hand, I am enchanted by photographs as artefacts themselves, made of paper which came from trees, inhabiting an organic material form susceptible to decay, yet with a longevity that far exceeds our own.

Through and through the ponderings on the farmers’ medium and message, and yet a deeper mystery pervades. We might easily pontificate about our human means of communication and understanding-- and yet, still we wonder. We wonder about the tree. Who is this chestnut tree? This seemingly sentient giant who survives and silently oversees it all?

When conceiving of a game for our project, Monopoly keeps coming to mind. It has some wonderful features which could yield a positively educational and creatively inspiring game for users.

The Londonist’s ‘The Real Life Monopoly Board’ takes the classic game and translates it onto the physical geography of London. This is an interesting concept as we discussed virtual games which take people around the town, not unsimilar to Pokemon Go. I’m not sure how we might incorporate this into our ‘game of plant life’ but it also reminds me of an idea that I came up with during our Ideation Game (see previous post), in which readers would experience the ‘city as a storybook’ and have to travel to different physical locations to unlock chapters...

The purpose of this blog has to document the creative process work undertaken by myself and my team, @blueacescity, in response to a Design Brief set forth by the leaders of the Creativity in Design module within the MSc course in Human-Computer Interaction Design at City, University of London.

Whilst my previous posts here have outlined some highlights of my contributions and take on our team’s process thus far, this post aims to distill our threads of work into a condensed vision for a deliverable that meets the Design Brief’s criteria for a smart city design in the form of ‘a device, service or infrastructure that alters the experience of the city and impacts people’s lives.’

Before proceeding, it is important to note the Design Brief’s definition of a ‘smart city’:

Through the use of ubiquitous technologies and data infrastructures, it [the smart city] aims to optimise the movements of people and things, and control the production, supply and consumption of goods and services (Kitchin 2014).

Through our work thus far, our team has honed in on the ‘production, supply and consumption of goods,’ with specific interest in circular economies. We’ve looked at the lifecycles of a specific set of material objects (books, toys, clothes and plants) and considered the ways that smart city technologies can facilitate the reuse, rehabilitation and sharing of objects.

The design brief also provides a relatively explicit delineation of what makes a smart city ‘smart’:

“Smartness", here, is implemented through the collection, aggregation and analysis of data. Citizen’s bodies, and their flows, consumption and communications, are tracked and monitored to optimise the efficiency of civic operations and public life.

Whilst the language in the brief alludes to the idea of a project outcome which includes a specific technological design intervention, Lara explained during our coursework feedback session with Lara that the final outcome 'can be speculation, provocation, or artwork-- it doesn’t have to be a working, problem-solving thing.’

With this in mind, our group has discussed the idea of creating a toolkit and/or game to help facilitate innovation and ideation in the domain of smart city design. I like this idea for many reasons, not the least of which is the considerations of feasibility and usefulness. Realistically, it would be outside of the scope of the project to innovate a system of the scale that a startup might endeavor. Similarly, a ‘working, problem-solving’ design intervention would require levels of time and resources beyond what we have available. 

Many great research projects forego offering singular, concrete answers to the problems they explore. Instead, the outcomes of such projects offer further questions-- albeit hopefully better, more narrow, poignant questions. In this humble and wise tradition, it is my opinion that the outcome of our project should be a toolkit that poses thoughtful questions and activities in order to help smart city designers reach innovative insights.

Despite the purposeful decision to keep the outcome an open one, we nevertheless need to narrow down our prospects such that the toolkit we provide poses specific enough scenarios to engender the greatest depth of thought for its users. Therefore, it is important to hone the scope of the time, place and topic of our toolkit. Well-- what better place to start than the here and now?

The game will be set in present-day London. Primarily because we are here in London, and present-day enquiries allow us and the users of our game to work with what we have. The creation of our game must consider the sociocultural, geopolitical, and economic contexts of this situated context.

With our theme of material consumption in mind, London has a unique identity as a sort of bridge between the extreme consumerism of the US and the somewhat ‘artisan’ economy of Europe. These patterns of consumption are situated within political structures which straddle the laissez-faire capitalism of America and the more socialist ideologies of the European continent.

Culturally, London is arguably the most cosmopolitan city on Earth. People come here from all over the world to be educated! Including the members of our team, cohort and City University. Beyond City, there is a rich concentration of Universities in central London: UCL, Kings, Imperial, RCA, City, LSE within a couple miles of each other.

Today, we discussed these thoughts and more and agreed as a group to narrow the scope of the project to that of a game to be used as a tool in the design of smart city solutions to circular economies. By anonymous vote, we further narrowed the scope of our game to include the theme of plants (excluding books, toys and clothes).

From here, we plan to iterate designs for games similar to the ‘Ideation Game’ that I originally designed and wrote about (and that the team played a couple of weeks ago). 

Recently, whilst looking for hummus in the back corner of Whole Foods Camden, a small woman approached me. “Excuse me,” she said, “but could you help me reach this?” -- she pointed up at an open door on the top row of a block of yellow parcel lockers, probably at least 2 metres above the ground. With some effort craning myself upwards, I was able to reach the parcel inside, and handed it to her.

We’re interested in Amazon lockers, because they are a (mostly) pubicly accessible resource for the storage and receipt of physical goods, which are ordered via Amazon’s web application.

The first step in my exploration of Amazon lockers was to suss out their locations across London using Google maps:

From observing this map, it’s interesting to note that each locker has a name, which immediately serves to anthropomorphize these inanimate objects. The map gives a good sense of how the lockers are distributed throughout the city, but in order to actually arrange the delivery of a parcel to one of the lockers, one must access Amazon’s web application for use of the lockers:

From this landing page, the system looks simple and easy to use. I’m eager to learn more and click the ‘Find a locker near you’ button, which leads me to the following screen:

Here, I enter my postcode and click ‘Search,’ which leads me to the next screen:

Yikes! My immediate reaction to this screen was negative. I felt immediately overwhelmed, probably by an overload of textual information. First, there’s inconsistency: this screen does not match the simple, minimalist aesthetic of the landing page. Furthermore, it is unclear to me what the differently shaped pins on the map indicate. Next, I learn that some lockers are in restricted access locations, which takes away from the communally accessible idea I had of this system.

After scrolling down the list, I found that a couple of lockers are located in public libraries, which fits nicely into our exploration, which also includes libraries. I jotted down the locations of these lockers and add them into the team’s Google doc of potential observation locations. at our next meeting, we decided to set aside this exploration for now and focus on object lifestyles instead.

I love flowers. Always have, always will. You can find me hanging around the floral stands at any grocery or farmer’s market (and forking out far too much of my monthly budget on blooms). It should come as no surprise that the Columbia Road Flower Market was among the first locales that I sought out upon arriving in London.

In a former life, this fondness landed me a job working on a small team that spent our summer weekends creating elaborately beautiful floral installations for weddings (... and tearing them down, but that part comes later). 

Behold one of my favourites below: a ceremony arch constructed on a Saturday afternoon in the summer of 2016 for a wedding in Steamboat, Colorado.

This installation gleefully surprised our team when we returned to the wedding site the morning after the event and found its blooms still beaming forth at us. It was a surprise because sadly, arrangements like these rarely last a few hours, let alone overnight. We attributed the miracle to the crisp, cold mountain night air, and snapped a few photos (like the one above) to capture this ephemeral moment of beauty.

In order to prolong the terribly brief lifespan of creations like this one, flowers are usually sprayed and/or soaked with chemical preservatives, packaged with ample insulation for shipping, and refrigerated immediately upon arrival at the floral studio. I took a guilty, indulgent pleasure in poking my head into the giant fridge and beholding the sea of blooms.

On-site, bricks of synthetic floral foam and small plastic flower vials are used to keep arrangements fresh. The worst part of all, however, is what happens at teardown. Typically after midnight-- just a handful of hours after each bloom was painstakingly arranged ever so perfectly-- the team returns to the venue to briskly demolish and remove all every last shred of decor. 

Of course, not all installations are as epic as the glorious arch of roses above. Many designs are refreshingly simple (due more probably to budget-conscious couples as environmentally conscious ones). One such solution mimimises organic waste whilst maximising charm through the use of reusable but beautiful eclectic glassware, such as the colourful vintage bottles and goblets pictured below alongside contained candles.

Another option is to forego the flowers entirely in favour of vine clippings such as those below which climb and wind around twisted twine balls and strings of fairy lights.

Incorporating reusable decor elements saves on cash and carbon footprints, creating less waste. We did our best to save and store what we could, but we (and event planners and hosts far and wide) could have benefitted immensely from a sharing system for decor materials, like the twine balls above or the Birch branch ‘chuppah’ below.

Whilst the main components of this Birch branch arch were saved for reuse, the flowers alas had nowhere to go but into black bin bags. After all, most were wilted (or would be in a day or two). We asked around, but nobody seemed to want them. Other florist friends said the same. So I did what any flower lover would and hoarded them in my home.

Despite my enthusiastic adoption of the arrangements, their impermanence still wore heavily on my heart. I left the floral industry and moved on to design residential gardens (like the one below in Sonoma County, California) and make art from flora photography (like the collages below made from acrylic on paper digitally layered with scanned images of Aspen leaves).

Flash forward a few years to a flat in Finsbury Park, London, with three collaborators working on a Smart City brief for a Creativity module on a design course. Through a long and winding discussion born from discussions about mine & Gemma’s volunteering for the Algorithmic Food Justice Project, into conversations about freecycling, Rosie introduced us to Farmopolis, which is a sort of rescue home for plants previously featured in the Chelsea Flower show.

Given my lifelong love affair with plants and knowledge of the horrific waste in the floral industry, I was immediately in love with the concept of Farmopolis. Through sites like Farmopolis’s The Jetty, there is hope yet for rescued plants in retirement from their event decor careers. But this tactic does require the use of live plants in event installations to begin with. Whether building giant installations for the Chelsea Flower Show, or gathering some modest decor for your own intimate event, it is worth considering how we might use and reuse adornments that are alive! 

Finally, I’ll leave you with some inspiration from Lila B Design, whose gorgeous live centrepieces would be a joy to keep and share:

Per earlier posts about our project & process, I am researching the lifecycle of plants-- not in the traditional ecological sense, but instead looking at plants as a persona in a world of reused, rehabilitated and shared material resources. One clear opportunity for this smart city paradigm is the use of seed libraries. 

While researching seed libraries which are integrated with digital components, I remembered a couple of participants from an Algorithmic Food Justice Project workshop for which I volunteered late last year. These two gentlemen have an organisation called S33D life. When digging deeper, a sentence from the S33D life manifesto both confounded and inspired me:

“We used S33D’s MVP application to log their [the seeds’] existence and origin stories, exported as a CSV file and hashed onto the Bitcoin blockchain using Proof of Existence (see Virtual Network f.3.1)” (yOur Golden Dream v2, p.7)

I didn’t understand this sentence fully, so I Googled MVP application, but the Wikipedia page only served to further confuse me. I also wasn’t sure how an object’s existence and origin story were logged through Bitcoin, which I know to be a financial currency. Oh well, I thought, I’ll ask the team if any of them can make sense of it. (As an aside, I did bring this up at the next team meeting, but alas, we could not make sense of the tech jargon.)

MVP and currency aside, my brain was churning through this sentence…

Existences logged… hashed onto the Bitcoin blockchain… Blockchain! 

Blockchain could be a key to our future smart city technology! What if each point in an object’s lifecycle were to be logged in a blockchain, noting the object’s location and material state. This would provide consumers and producers with a way to trace the history of objects and material resources.

Blockchain is an ideal technology for our smart city paradigm because of the technology’s somewhat unique community ownership and administration, which very much aligns with the values of our imagined sharing society. Furthermore, because the chains are so secure by nature of their design, neither corporations nor individuals would be able to tamper with objects’ histories for personal or financial benefit.

From a practical perspective, logging object lifecycles via blockchain would provide a metric for the longevity of objects and therefore could provide the basis for any number of programs to incentivise reuse, rehabilitation and recycling of objects. From a human perspective, this digital logbook might foster community cohesion through a shared sense of responsibilty and respect for material resources and the environment.

I’m reminded of family heirlooms and records, such as the family bible described by Rosie, or the family tree books described by Gemma and Joyce, which spark a sense of sentimentality in users. When the history of an object is traceable, visible, even tangible, we can see and feel that its longevity outlasts our own relatively brief human lifecycles.

Kudi catchers! I posted about these last week with a clip from the film Waking Life. This is the kudi catcher we collected from our visit to the Play Well exhibit at the Wellcome Collection.

I love this little paper toy for many reasons.

Cheap and accessible: anyone can make one with paper and markers

Tactile: they are fun to fold and there’s a sense of accomplishment when their little origami shape takes form. Playing the game involves manually opening and closing the piece like the mouth of a puppet.

Discovery: there is a sense of curiosity and excitement opening the folded number to see what you’re going to get!

Creativity : when I was a kid, these contained little prophecies like a fortune cookie 🥠 which allowed the maker to use their imagination to dream up future scenarios for the players.

Infinite potential: they don’t just have to contain fortunes— one could write/draw anything inside! Just think of the possibilities...!

This kudi catcher was found at the entrance to the Play Well exhibit at the Wellcome Collection. Very much like tools in the probe packs discussed in class, its purpose is to get people thinking in new ways (in this case about play).

It came as a flat piece of paper with fold lines, numbers, colors and questions on one side, and instructions on the opposite side:

This serves as a brilliant template for the creation of our own kudi catchers!

The questions on this one are:

What is your favorite game?

What’s good and bad about video games?

Do adults still play? If so, how?

Who decides the rules of the game?

What would a world without play be like?

What things stop children from having the chance to play?

If you designed a toy, what would it look like? Who would play with it?

Should children be able to play without supervision?

For my own kudi catcher about plants’ lifecycles, some of the potential questions I would ask might be:

If you were a plant, what kind would you be?

If plants could talk, what do you think they would say?

What’s good and bad about the way we use plants today?

If a plant library existed, how might it work? Who would use it?

Who decides where plants get to live, and how?

What things stop plants from living their best lives?

Should plants be able to grow uncontrolled by humans?

If plants took over the world, how would it be different?

Rosie playing our Ideation Game, photographed by Annie

Annie’s Ideation Game

A few weeks ago, our team settled on the theme of ‘freecycling’ as the focus of our smart city project, with an emphasis on reuse, rehabilitation, and sharing of material resources. This led us to seek out interesting places in the city where we saw some potential for integration within a ‘freecycle’ smart city system. 

Last week, we considered the myriad of interests around this theme and distinguished locations (e.g. libraries, Amazon lockers, etc.) from the objects that inhabit and/or move through these locations. 

Based on our observations so far, we distilled a whole city’s worth of things into four ‘archetypal’ objects, whose lifecycles we will study. These include books, toys, clothes, and plants. We elected to base our ongoing observations, interviews and desk research around the creation of personas and lifecycle journeys for these objects. A deep understanding of these objects and their past and present lifecycles is necessary to design for their future (just as in UX, a deep understanding of users is necessary to design for their needs).

So we had a plan for personas and user journeys, adding some structure to our research. Now it’s time to start ideating. How could we facilitate the most creative possible ideation around our topic? My first instinct was to return to our beloved theme of play to uncover solutions, turning over ideas about how to use play to uncover various potential smart city innovations around the topic at hand. I grabbed my sketchbook and ‘thought out loud’ through sketching various game formats, including a card game, a game of dice, and a board game:

Sketches of game ideas, drawn and photographed by Annie

These ideas then percolated in the back of my mind for a few days, and yesterday morning, the concept for a game gelled. This game was inspired by the Quiet Year game that Joyce introduced us to, which we played during our first team meeting, and requires the following materials:

playing cards

dice

a marker

a big sheet of paper

imagination

collaboration

In our Ideation Game, the playing cards are assigned object-location combinations, such that each object represents a suit, and each number/face card represents a location. The numbers on the dice represent different types of technologies. Before the meeting, I generated an initial series of designations, to which the team agreed and amended.

The rules of the Ideation Game, written and photographed by Annie

The purpose of the Ideation Game is to generate innovative, out-of-the-box ideas through imagination and collaboration. To play the game:

A player draws a card and rolls a dice, which will give them a combination of an object (suit of card) + location (number/face of card) + technology (dice number). 

For example, if the player draws a 6 of Spades and rolls a II on the dice, according to the above key, Spades = plants, 6 = hospital, and ii = internet of things.

Therefore, the player must quickly imagine a scenario in a future smart city system that involves plants in hospitals, somehow using iOT (extra points if the scenario relates to reuse, rehabilitation and/or sharing of material resources, per our team’s chosen smart city theme).

Once the player throws out their first ideas, the team responds and the group collaborates together to imagine various scenarios involving this combination of object + location + technology.

Finally, the player who initiated the turn uses the marker and paper to draw a small sketch that represents their favorite imaginative scenario as imagined and iterated through the group’s discussion.

Once the player’s sketch is complete, the next player takes their turn beginning with step 1. Repeat as many rounds as desired/feasible!

We convened for the game after a group progress report and a quick strategic session about plans moving forward. To begin with, the team was super receptive to this game, for which I was really grateful :)

Joyce sketching, photographed by Annie

Gemma began the game by drawing the Queen of Spades and rolling a IV on the dice. This gave her the combination of books + bank + wearable tech. She told a story and we riffed on it, and then she drew a symbol. Rosie’s first draw gave us the combination of toys + family home + drones. Joyce’s gave us clothes + library + VR, and so on. We each took two draws and because of the richness of our collaborative ideation discussions, these two rounds took us two hours! But time flies when you’re having fun!

Gemma sketching, photographed by Annie

At the beginning of the game, people’s ideas were quite literal and in the ‘expected’ realm of ways our brains might normally connect these types of concepts, but as the game continued and we got our creative juices flowing, the ideas became more and more innovative and unexpected, generating tons of creative ideation! HOORAY! Equally as importantly, the laughter and playfulness continued to build up throughout the game, so by the time we finished we were in absolute stitches with giggles. 

Our collaborative ideation sketch, photographed by Rosie

I’m sure you’re curious about what these little doodles meant to us and why they took two hours to produce! Rest assured, we will unveil the brilliance of our creativity in future posts through stories, images, and video. 

In the meantime, I think it is relevant to briefly reflect on (my perception of) the success of the game in facilitating generative ideation. Our team has had a keen interest in play since the beginning of the term, when Joyce introduced us to the Quiet Year game, followed by our visit to the Play Well exhibit at the Wellcome Collection. I think we instinctively felt that play is a fantastic way of catalyzing creative thought. Certainly, at the Play Well exhibit, we saw examples of artwork and architecture inspired by play and/or incorporating play into the design process. 

As a psychologist, I love to look for reasons to explain phenomena like this play/creativity link, and what comes to mind is the theory of divergent thinking (McCrae, 1987), which defines creativity as a style of thinking that diverges from linear reasoning and typical thought patterns or associations. Whether or not this is an accurate definition of creativity aside, we might think of play as one way of stimulating divergent thinking. Our typical thought patterns generally fall within the well-worn neural pathways of productivity/survival mode, which is necessary to complete work and fulfill daily tasks and chores. Thus, to push our thoughts out of these ruts, it helps to get out of the ‘work’ mindset. 

Because people are used to playing games for social, fun, playful scenarios, the very act of sitting around a table with a group of people with playing cards and dice shifts us into a different mindset. We loosen up a bit. We laugh. We know we are expected to think on our feet, to react quickly, and perhaps most importantly: to take ourselves (and our ideas) less seriously. It’s just a game, after all, so we’re allowed to be totally silly and fantastical and out of this world...

The following is a good example of a simple persona used as a data analysis tool in HCID research, which provides information about a human subject. This simple persona template contains three columns: 

A hand-drawn illustration and name, providing distinguishable visual and verbal identifiers as well as capturing the visual character of the user. 

A handful of descriptive details, describing aspects of the user’s semantic identity, societal roles, and historic background (i.e. data gathered about the user’s past and present)

A few challenges and opportunities that the user faces with respect to their future identities, roles, and/or actions.

Above: ‘Engaging persona’ example by Terri Phillips as found on interaction-design.org

An excerpt from Personas - A Simple Introduction, by RIKKE FRIIS DAM and YU SIANG TEO:

‘Engaging Personas

“The engaging perspective is rooted in the ability of stories to produce involvement and insight. Through an understanding of characters and stories, it is possible to create a vivid and realistic description of fictitious people. The purpose of the engaging perspective is to move from designers seeing the user as a stereotype with whom they are unable to identify and whose life they cannot envision, to designers actively involving themselves in the lives of the personas. The other persona perspectives are criticized for causing a risk of stereotypical descriptions by not looking at the whole person, but instead focusing only on behavior.” – Lene Nielsen

Engaging personas can incorporate both goal and role-directed personas, as well as the more traditionalvrounded personas. These engaging personas are designed so that the designers who use them can become more engaged with them. The idea is to create a 3D rendering of a user through the use of personas. The more people engage with the persona and see them as ’real’, the more likely they will be to consider them during the process design and want to serve them with the best product. These personas examine the emotions of the user, their psychology, backgrounds and make them relevant to the task in hand. The perspective emphasises how stories can engage and bring the personas to life.’ 

For the purposes of our current project, the personas we produce will be based on a series of material objects, rather than human product ‘users’. We will utilize the theoretical justification and process of persona creation described above, but instead of people, the characters and stories we are seeking to understand include peoples’ everyday possessions, including toys, clothing, books and plants.

Plant personas by Annie

Yesterday, the team spoke about ‘object lifecycles’ with reference to species’ lifecycles as studied by ecologists. In our case, object lifecycles refer to the journeys of physical objects, beginning with their creation and ending with their destruction. It is important to understand objects’ current and past lifecycles in order to imagine how these object lifetimes might be prolonged through reuse, rehabilitation, and sharing in future smart cities.

Today, I became curious about the ways that other researchers and creatives have conceptualized object lifecycles, and was intrigued to find that the search terms ‘object lifecycle’ and ‘object lifetime’ lead to articles and information pertaining to the domain of object-oriented programming (OOP). There’s a link to the Wikipedia article above.

It is a fun and serendipitous twist that the terms ‘object lifetime’ and ‘object lifecycle’ refer both to the ecological concept of lifecycles (e.g. the phases of a given species’ life) and also to the lifecycles of digital objects (e.g. bits of code in various programming languages).