Workshop Schedule

Meeting Ground, a set of collaborations that considers the earth beneath our feet and the confluence of art, science and spirituality, invites you to join us as we touch the ground during this period of seasonal change and seismic cultural shift. We can’t physically connect the way we might like to at the moment but can we take a moment to embrace what we share in common? Can meeting the ground be a means of reoccupying colonized bodies? Can the ground become a site for shared intention and experience?

Meeting Ground invites all workshop participants to touch the ground in a synchronous act of intentional attention. Greet the ground from wherever you are in your own way- with your hand, “hello,”, a poem, a prayer, silence, or song. We invite you to join us, in whatever way you can ground yourself, whether it’s touching the earth itself, the arm of a loved one, or something that connects your senses to either and share your experience.

We touch the ground as a way of to return to presence, participate in an intentional act of attention, experience the exchange between the human body and the earth body, witness, grieve, make direct sensual contact, and offer evidence of what we hold in common (ground, light, air, and water and all of the imbedded systems, histories, and beings within that shared common). From wherever you are urban, suburban, rural, private or public spaces, soft or hardscapes, we invite you to touch or get closer to your ground during the June 29 workshop. We’ll be engaging this action as a direct sensual, immediate act and heuristic reclamation of the vital entanglement between human and more-than-human and we invite you to do the same. In touching the earth, we ask, are there ways we touch ourselves, our ancestors, our co-inhabitants?

Share your experience (if you choose to) by posting to #meeting_ground and uploading to a URL that will display the evidence and create a collection of participation across time zones and locations. The shared experiences to be part of co-created, re-imagined artwork in public digital and physical spaces that makes visible, tangible, and audible the shared common and encourage participants across all demographics to become collaborators, attentive gatherers, agents advancing collective understanding of shared space from multiple viewpoints.

For the DIY architecture symposium, I propose to present my outdoor public art installation, Walk This Way. This piece is a self-guided, participatory walk in the woods which encourages play, observation, and regard for the natural world. Through constructed signage featuring prompts and rhetorical questions, visitors are invited to participate in the walk by performing the various prompts and reflecting on the posted questions. Through fostering an intentional encounter with nature, this project provides an opportunity for participants to relate to the natural world, and remember that they are moving through an ecological community; a more than human world.

Situated along a trail at Little Bennett Regional Park in Clarksburg, Maryland, Walkers will encounter ten different signs with text. The text, in the form of prompts and questions, posted on the signage features various actions relating directly to walking, or natural elements featured along the trail. For example, one sign will read, “How do you have a conversation with a creek?” Walk This Way is being completed in collaboration with the Montgomery County Parks and Planning Department.

In this presentation, I will review the progress I have made in the past eight months in developing this project, as well as the written text prompts presented in the installation itself. The research, which formed the basis of these performative prompts, led me to investigate environmental personhood, meaning the legal rights granted to natural features by government, as well as the Fluxus Performance Art movement and the Walking Art movement in the second half of the 20th century. Another area of research led me into the history of land conservation methodology in the state of Maryland. Historically, the state government has rationalized human recreation as a purpose for conservation, up until the 1960’s when the paradigm shifted towards conserving areas off limits to humans.Today, the local government straddles between these two methodologies. I will discuss this history and how it influences the public’s perception of nature and land, as well as speak to my own experience in how collaborating with a local government agency has altered and influenced this project.

The language of climate change adaptation and biodiversity loss is often couched in terms of resilience and vulnerability. This is problematic as both of these terms imply a state of being where firstly, resilience is seen as strength and the secondly, vulnerability is often characterised as fragility. I am interested in these terms and ow they translate to interrelationships across species.

My focus is on the societal expectations which bind such words as limited and not in keeping with dynamic systems of life in which humans are just a part of. Since 2019, I have been developing a series of walkshops under the banner of Treecreative aimed at reconnecting to local places through deep listening, creativity and mindfulness practice. These events have been presented online as virtual walks as well as in person at a number of local nature parks around the capital region. With COVID-19 acting as a stark reminder of our human fragility and lack of resilience to more than human elements in our environments, it seemed timely to reassess how such terms limit our engagement across species, in particular around narratives of care and compassion. As discussed in an article published in Medium:

“The human condition mirrors that of the ecosystem in which we live. There are tipping points, thresholds from which there can not be a return to the state of normalcy. In the context of ecological science and environmental management the terms ‘tipping points’ and ‘boundaries’ are often used in relation to abrupt and irreversible changes.” As part of the DIY & More-than-Human Media Architecture: Allegories, Entanglements & Speculative Practice workshop, I would like to address some of the language used to define states on ‘being’, both human and more than human, which then intention of exploring how we can challenge how we use language to colonise and limit phenomenological experience and gestures of connection across species.

I am particularly interested in themes related to the Batesonian Warm Data work in concert with Animist Psychology as potential frameworks. These themes complement Indigenous knowledge as forms of potentiality that can reawaken and deepen a psychology of care and empathy evolved from openness and vulnerability.

At a practical level, Treecreative focuses on the importance of:

- exploring nature through walking, creative process, deep listening and close observation

- connecting to nature, urban forests and woodlands to increase health and wellbeing

- mindfulness and meditation as modalities which alleviate stress and anxiety and increase an overall sense of well being.

Since starting this project, I have also been gathering feedback from participants, applying a model of continuous improvement to how the walkshops are designed and delivered. In the context of the DIY workshop, I would like to share this knowledge and in particular insights around language and ‘being’ that echo my interest in interspecies descriptions and limitations of words that seek to evoke and reflect ‘conditions.’ By challenging language which reduces and obscures the view, I seek to explore how we can use this same language in ways that a and empower the need for action, care and awareness.

“Tools are fundamental to action, and through our actions we generate the world”

- Arturo Escobar

Using the Observing A Year Library as a platform for investigation, this second workshop will explore more broadly the idea of the tool and its importance in world making. Typically we think of tools as physical objects created with our hands. But they can also be something abstract — like poetry, song, dance, or ritual. Ultimately, they are mediums through which we connect, influence, and control the world (McLuhan, 32). As the effects of the Anthropocene are becoming more deadly, we must reinvestigate our relationship to existing and outdated tools that are driving the Sixth Mass Extinction. Building stronger relationships with the planet will steer our path towards a sustainable course, but this will take new and forgotten tools alike— be these physical or immaterial. In this workshop we will dive into how immaterial tools, like rituals or attention practices, can illuminate our entanglement with the world and cultivate care. These connective actions can be thought of as a type of technology that functions to nurture our relationship with other beings, the surrounding landscape, and the invisible (Somé, 60).

​

Through re-approaching the tool, we seek to address the following questions during the workshop:

• How can we use the lessons held in mythology to imagine new tools that address contemporary problems?

• What might new tools look like that cultivate more just, engaged, and sustainable futures?

• How can collective imagination play an integral role in the development of new tools and their uses?

Workshop

The workshop will begin with an introduction to the Library, its genesis, and highlight some of the submissions, themes, and ideas. The session will engage our sense perception as a tool for uncovering reciprocity between humans and nonhumans. Culminating the workshop, participants will utilize their experience and imagination to design their own tool with the goal of generating or illuminating deeper connections to their world. The session may engage walking, listening, drawing, and writing as tools that aid in reflection. Facilitating this workshop and larger discussions is an invitation to learn new and evolving languages that enable greater participation in the world around us.

For the more-than-human (other sentient creatures and other living organisms the very existence and core onto-epistemic (Barad, 2007) assumptions of media architecture are deeply problematic (Foth & Caldwell, 2018), existing within a set of symbolic meanings drawn from human cultural symbolic systems at the conceptual level and dependent on infrastructures of materials, production of disruptive light etc. at the material level. This workshop proposal invites playful, speculative story world-building based on the premise that, as Ingold (2009) announces, animals inhabit meaning-full worlds. Such worlds may be inaccessible via human cultural symbol systems but they may be accessible through world building and speculative fictions.

The work builds on previous research about animals as story-makers (Turner & Morrison, 2021) which explores narrative methodologies and co-performance (Haraway, 2008) as opportunity to evidence agentic meaning-making on the part of companion animals, and the use of narrative inquiry methods (Green, 2013; Haydon, van Der Riet, & Inder, 2018) and stories in the creation of narrative identity (Ricœur, 1984) in place (Tuan, 1977) and in particular, in the built environment.

When it comes to more -than-human as agentic makers in media architecture, there are opportunities. Foth and Caldwell (2018) point to emerging meaningful media architecture projects which contribute to our understanding of the more than human experience or which are created according to standards emphasising our relationship with nature. Enabling more-than-human contribution in media architecture is not so problematic e.g. Carbon Arts’ Melbourne Mussel Choir where mussels are wired up to produce data streams based on reaction to water quality etc. is described as giving them ‘a voice’ (allowing them to become rock stars). Others have considered a range of participation ‘rungs’ in the same way that citizen participation has been categorised (Arnstein, 1969). In the case of companion animals for example, Hirskyj-Douglas and Reed (Hirskyj-Douglas & Read, 2015) differentiate between training (animals participate without agency), freedom (participate with a degree of choice e.g. play or don’t play), informed e.g. the animal understanding its choices (perhaps through repetition - although this creates a difficult line re ‘training’ and empowerment - this latter being a speculative level of participation e.g. we understand that the animal might understand at an intuitive level - especially with close animal companions where much of the activity is co-performance (Mancini, 2018). However, stewardship (with all that it entails) of the more-than-human remains a feature of a number of projects and including more-than-human as magnetic meaning makers is a challenge (Wolch & Owens, 2017).

A pathway into the nexus of the dilemma posed when we endeavour to understand non-humans as agentic meaning-makers in their own right (Ingold, 2009) is to explore what Freire (Freire, 1970) would call problem posing. Here, the western onto-epistemic goals of seeking answers and solutions is disavowed in favour of deep reflection and criticality with a view to engaging in meaning-making, even if, as in Australian Indigenous community meetings, no decision is made. The process and the stories being created being considered more important than some concrete ‘outcome’. Anne Galloway (2019) suggests that asking ‘what if?’ questions and engaging is speculative design and fictions is one approach that can be powerfully used (Galloway & Caudwell, 2018). Key in Galloway’s approach is the idea that speculative design critiques design itself and aims to create alternative realities, opening up pathways for the imagination and (other) world-building (Dunne & Raby, 2013).

References

Arnstein, S. R. (1969). A ladder of citizen participation. Journal of the American Institute of planners, 35(4), 216-224.

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press.

Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative everything: design, fiction, and social dreaming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Foth, M., & Caldwell, G. A. (2018). More-than-human media architecture. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 4th Media Architecture Biennale Conference.

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder.

Galloway, A., & Caudwell, C. (2018). Speculative design as research method. Undesign: critical practice at the intersection of art and design. Routledge, 85-96.

Green, B. (2013). Narrative inquiry and nursing research. Qualitative Research Journal, 13(1), 62-71. doi:10.1108/14439881311314586

Haraway, D. J. (2008). When species meet (Vol. 224): U of Minnesota Press.

Haydon, G., van Der Riet, P., & Inder, K. (2018). Narrative Inquiry in Nursing Research: Tensions, Bumps, and the Research Puzzle. International Journal Of Qualitative Methods, 17(1). Retrieved from https://journals-sagepubcom.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/doi/full/10.1177/1609406918801621#_i130

Hirskyj-Douglas, I., & Read, J. C. (2015). Doggy Ladder of Participation. Paper presented at the Workshop on Animal-Computer Interaction, British HCI.

Ingold, T. (2009). Point, Line and Counterpoint: From Environment to Fluid Space. In A. Berthoz & Y. Christen (Eds.), Neurobiology of “Umwelt”: How Living Beings Perceive the World (pp. 141-155). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Mancini, C. (Ed.) (2018). Animal-Computer Interaction: Animals as Co-Designers of Multispecies Technologically Supported Ecosystems. Participatory Design Conference (PDC), Hasselt & Genk, Belgium.

Ricœur, P. (1984). Time and narrative I (K. McLaughlin & D. Pellauer, Trans. Vol. 1). Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press.

Tuan, Y.-f. (1977). Space and place : the perspective of experience. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Turner, J., & Morrison, A. (2021). Designing Slow Cities for More than Human Enrichment: Dog Tales—Using Narrative Methods to Understand Co-Performative Place-Making. Multimodal Technologies and Interaction, 5(1), 1.

Wolch, J., & Owens, M. (2017). Animals in contemporary architecture and design. Humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies, 8, 1-26.

Cities were built by the mind of men to serve them. Also, women use the city as much as they allow. In the first Sumerian city-states shaped around wheat production, the power of man has a voice in the order and administration of the city. It is the man who has knowledge and with this knowledge exerts power on women. Similarly, in medieval cities, women in general did not have the knowledge that men passed on to each other for generations. Therefore, cities reflect men’s power-oriented perspectives.

With the invention of the printing press, printed books enabled knowledge to reach a large segment of the society. Moreover, it caused the raise of literacy rate of women. In addition, women who followed magazines, newspapers and books started to be involve in social life and city life. Basically, Access to information changed the position of women in cities. In middle of 1800s, modern cities began to take shape in line with emerging needs. As in the city of Paris where Hausmann renovated , women started to take place on streets together with men. Furthermore, in modern cities shaped men’s perspective, males decide which part of the city and what time interval women could use the city safely. Well, If women designed and built cities from women perspectives, what kind of city they would make?

In the context of the workshop, it would be researched how women gain their own perspectives on the cities by leaving men’s perspectives. Plus, how digital technologies, particularly smart phone, help them express their ideas and feeling regarding city as well as aid them to organize. There is no doubt that male-dominated perspective has been given to women through education in culture. Therefore, women need a new medium to express themselves. During the workshop, a social media account will be opened where women living in Istanbul will share their experiences, opinions and recommendations regarding Istanbul. At he end of the process, a short video will be made, which will focus on what women discuss most about their city, what they suggest, how women gain organization skill in digital environment. Moreover, to understand women’s perspectives would be important for future research.

Finally, in order for cities to be designed to serve both genders more fairly, women must able to regain their own perspectives about the city and must have the ability to be organized. At this point, digital technologies offer them an environment to contact with people.

Red Dot Foundation works at the intersection of gender, data and tech, urban design and community engagement. Its flagship program is Safecity, a platform that crowdsources personal stories of sexual harassment and abuse in public spaces. This data which maybe anonymous, gets aggregated as hot spots on a map indicating trends at a local level. The idea is to make this data useful for individuals, local communities and local administration to identify factors that causes behaviour that leads to violence and work on strategies for solutions.

Why is it important to report cases of harassment and abuse?

UN Women states that 1 in 3 women face some kind of sexual assault at least once in their lifetime. But in our experience, these statistics are grossly underreported specially in India where a rape occurs every 20 mins in India. Yet most women and girls do not talk about this abuse for multiple of reasons - fear of society, culture, victim-blaming, fear of the police, tedious formal procedures etc. As a result, women keep silent and this data is not captured anywhere but the perpetrator gets bolder over time and we accept it as part of our daily routine. This leads to under communication and underreporting of the issue. If there are poor official statistics, the problem is not visible and is not a true representation of the actual problem. Therefore we need to break our silence and document every instance of harassment and abuse in public spaces so that we can find the most effective solutions at the neighbourhood level.

Our main objective is to:

• Create awareness on sexual harassment and abuse and get women and other disadvantaged communities to break their silence and report their personal experiences.

• Collate this information to showcase location based trends and make this information available and useful for individuals, communities and local administration to solve the problem at the hyper-local level.

In this presentation, I will like to showcase our award-winning Safecity platform and share how we have used the data to engage communities and institutions to make spaces safer on college campuses, in neighbourhoods and the transport system.

As a “cool” digital medium, Virtual Reality (VR) has frequently participated in varying aspects of everyday life with the collective efforts of commercial enterprises, public institutions, and individual amateurs. Far from being a plain and easy-going medium, VR raises a series of debates within the industries and academic in terms of its communication paradigm, narrative storytelling, and even ethical norms. This study, however, is more interested in examining the paradoxical nature of VR via a dialectical paradigm influenced by Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (Jowett, 1888, pp. 214- 217). The research question how the “reality” established or modified by VR in the virtual world is thus concerned.

Via the critical theory approach, this study unpacks the abstract information flow of VR communication into sender, message, and receivers while also explaining how those anatomical agencies dialogue with each other. By drawing on John Hartley’s analytical framework of future digital communication (Hartley, 2012, p. 3), this study proposes an alternate model dubbed ‘metaphysical communication’ mainly composed of the developer, audience, and platform to understand the nature of contemporary VR in nonfiction narratives. Instead of a linear model, this new model highlights the necessity of using a dialogic mode to understand the growing complexity of digital communication, whose mechanism is not limited to be shaped by the “neutral technology” but also social culture, politics, and economy.

At last, a case study of Liberate Hong Kong Game (LHKG) is provided to further test the metaphysical communication model. LHKG is a recent VR narrative created by an anonymous group of developers who identify as the young protesters in the 2019 Hong Kong pro-democracy protests aiming to “realistically” restore the “truth” that happened on the street in Hong Kong (see Bloomberg, 2019). This case study mainly discusses three dualistic tensions existing in this VR nonfiction narrative: the roles of the audience (active or passive), developers (objective or subjective), and platform (democratic or hegemonic). It argues that the nature of VR as a medium is complex and paradoxical. Besides its external articulation that is predominately embedded by aggressive advertising, more attention should be paid to its internal agency innately shaped by the forces of emerging digital capitalism.

References

Bloomberg. (2019). Video Game Shows What It's Like Inside Hong Kong's Protests Retrieved May 4th, 2021 from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-01/now-you-too-canexperience-hong-kong-protest-violence-virtually?fbclid=IwAR24LekrILssvZ0cHtomj2uVbLy8n-CnHRpTz4IWFF-nBNR5adQtef36J4

Hartley, J. (2012). Digital futures for cultural and media studies. John Wiley & Sons.

Jowett, B. (1888). The republic of Plato. Clarendon press.

The Recognise My Presence is a hands-on workshop that aims to transform a cheap webcam into a medium for recording nocturnal life and nature with a further goal of live streaming the captured visuals through the DIY projector. The Recognise My Presence workshop serves as an invitation to re-imagine human existence within the more-than-human communities through the visual placement of livestreamed video and photo captures of nocturnal animals and nature inside the human dwelling.

The workshop intends to create hybrid video projections to push the boundaries between the invisible nature presence and human living spaces. Such aesthetic experiences shaped by the visual provocation may inform a politics of tomorrow.

All web cameras have an infrared (IR) filter inside, and with the removed IR filter a camera can see infrared light. That is, a web camera can be turned into the night vision camera with the use of IR LEDs, the same IR LEDs that are used in remote controls. The live streaming goes through the DIY night vision webcam to a smartphone. For this demonstration, the DIY smartphone projector will be made out of a cardboard box and some office supplies.

The projector doesn't have to be DIY but it has to be mobile so it can be taken wherever you move around your dwelling, enabling ongoing witnessing of the nature’s night life.

Abstract

1 The sharing economy (SE)

The Sharing Economy (SE), broadly refers to the use of digital platforms via

which users can exchange all kinds of resources and assets that are

considered to be idle. Such can be one’s tools (e.g., a driller, a grinder), a few

empty seats of one’s vehicle, a car, a bicycle, a scooter, a room or a couch,

some extra food etc. The design of the mediating digital tools (Sharing

Economy Platforms (SEPs)) which has been the epicenter of my research,

holds an important role on how sharing is performed (i.e. who designs the

platform and with which aims in mind, what business model the design of the

platform is supporting, what can be shared, under which terms and conditions,

how trust is built, how users data are collected, stored and used, how users

create digital identities etc) [10–12] Amidst the critics shaped against the big,

sharewashing and for-profit SE, while acknowledging that SEPs do not arise

as natural phenomena but are deliberately designed "social product[s]"[3, 9], in

my recent work, in order to explore "what difference does it make if mediation

takes one form vs. another?" [1] and how we can design SEPs through a

Solidarity HCI lens ‘for human rather than market needs’[14] I engaged with an

‘impromptu’ and community-driven ride-sharing ‘platform’[7]. One that ‘squats’

a FB group while hacking FB’s affordances to support its sharing ends. Simi-

larly, within my research inquiry, through a participatory action research

approach, I have been membering Karrot (2nd case study), an open-source

digital tool, a participatorily designed and managed platform that was initially

designed to support foodsaving/sharing communities and is slowly

redesigned to support other sharing initiatives. Be them, toy-sharing

communities, community makerspaces, collective kitchens etc.

2 Designing sharing economy platforms through a more-than-human design

lens

‘Will you share a driller or a grinder with a person that will use

it for building an animals’ cage?’

‘How will you behave to a shared robot that its previous user has

treated as a slave for three days in a row?’

‘Will you book a private room of which the owner had shooed all

the spiders in order to avoid bad reviews?’

‘How do we save and share ‘food-waste’ without ‘stealing’ it

from other animals that also go dumpster diving?’

‘What if you shared some extra apples with a stranger under

the condition that they will keep the seeds and put some effort in

generating new apple trees?’

Within the forthcoming internet of things everyday life,

where all objects are connected to a network and as data-

fed, AI smart devices shape personalities and gain more

and more autonomy and agency, digitally mediated sharing

is expected to proliferate and change. SEPs accordingly. In

such a trajectory, the so-called smart shareable objects, along

with humans and other non-human actors create a super

rich multispecies context. In this regard, comprehending

the more-than human consequences of humans’ activities,

inspired by animistic, ‘everything is alive’, post-human/more-

than human accounts [2, 4, 6, 8] that embrace D.Haraway’s

‘Why should our bodies end at the skin’ [5] the above are

to be seen as some very juvenilia and possibly speculative

trigger questions which however lay the ground to explore

how we can move from designing SEPs ‘for human rather

than market needs’ toward designing SEPs for ‘more-than-

human needs’ accordingly.

3 DIY media architecture, ‘more-than human design’ and digitally mediated

sharing

In this multispecies ecology where sharing is expecting to

proliferate and in an effort to reclaim the SE and promote

sharing as an interspecies, caring-based and solidarity-driven

activity, DIY media architecture can be seen as a ‘tuned’

version of the more static and traditional graffiti slogans that

condemn current sharewashing practices [13] and thus as a

performative means joining the ‘sharing discourse’.

What if a hostile -towards sleep, play, insects and birds-

public bench was appropriated and turned into a DIY smart

bench that as an interactive shared public platform points

to sharing as a caring-based activity and creates more-than-

human sharing experiences? How could DIY media architec-

ture better serve those that envision a different SE?

References

[1] Jonathan P. Allen. 2016. The Sharing Economy: Studying Technology-

Mediated Social Movements. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGMIS

Conference on Computers and People Research (Alexandria, Virginia,

USA) (SIGMIS-CPR ’16). Association for Computing Machinery, New

York, NY, USA, 65–67. https://doi.org/10.1145/2890602.2890609

[2] Rachel Clarke, Sara Heitlinger, Ann Light, Laura Forlano, Marcus Foth,

and Carl DiSalvo. 2019. More-than-Human Participation: Design for

Sustainable Smart City Futures. Interactions 26, 3 (April 2019), 60–63.

https://doi.org/10.1145/3319075

[3] Paul Dourish. 2010. HCI and Environmental Sustainability: The Politics

of Design and the Design of Politics. In Proceedings of the 8th ACM

Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (Aarhus, Denmark) (DIS

’10). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–10.

https://doi.org/10.1145/1858171.1858173

[4] Marcus Foth and Glenda Amayo Caldwell. 2018. More-than-Human

Media Architecture. In Proceedings of the 4th Media Architecture Bi-

ennale Conference (Beijing, China) (MAB18). Association for Comput-

ing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 66–75. https://doi.org/10.1145/3284389.3284495

[5] Donna Haraway. 2006. A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and

socialist-feminism in the late 20th century. In The international hand-

book of virtual learning environments. Springer, 117–158.

[6] Sarah Homewood, Marika Hedemyr, Maja Fagerberg Ranten, and

Susan Kozel. 2021. Tracing Conceptions of the Body in HCI: From

User to More-Than-Human. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference

on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Yokohama, Japan) (CHI ’21).

Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article

258, 12 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445656

[7] Vasilis Ntouros, Hara Kouki, and Vasilis Vlachokyriakos. 2021. De-

signing Sharing Economy Platforms through a ’Solidarity HCI’ Lens.

Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 5, CSCW1, Article 23 (April 2021),

25 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3449097

[8] Anuradha Reddy, A. Baki Kocaballi, Iohanna Nicenboim, Marie

Louise Juul Søndergaard, Maria Luce Lupetti, Cayla Key, Chris Speed,

Dan Lockton, Elisa Giaccardi, Francisca Grommé, Holly Robbins, Nam-

rata Primlani, Paulina Yurman, Shanti Sumartojo, Thao Phan, Viktor

Bedö, and Yolande Strengers. 2021. Making Everyday Things Talk:

Speculative Conversations into the Future of Voice Interfaces at Home.

In Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors

in Computing Systems (Yokohama, Japan) (CHI EA ’21). Association

for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 23, 16 pages.

https://doi.org/10.1145/3411763.3450390

[9] Alvin E Roth. 2015. Who gets what—and why: The new economics of

matchmaking and market design. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

[10] Trebor Scholz. 2016. Platform cooperativism. Challenging the corporate

sharing economy. New York, NY: Rosa Luxemburg Foundation (2016).

[11] Juliet B Schor and William Attwood-Charles. 2017. The “sharing” econ-

omy: labor, inequality, and social connection on for-profit platforms.

Sociology Compass 11, 8 (2017).

[12] Arun Sundararajan. 2016. The sharing economy: The end of employment

and the rise of crowd-based capitalism. Mit Press.

[13] Julia Tulke. 2020. "Tourism owns the hood:" The Emergence of Anti-

Airbnb Graffiti in Athens. https://aestheticsofcrisis.org/2020/anti-

airbnb-graffiti-in-athens/

[14] Vasillis Vlachokyriakos, Clara Crivellaro, Pete Wright, Evika Karama-

gioli, Eleni-Revekka Staiou, Dimitris Gouscos, Rowan Thorpe, Antonio

Krüger, Johannes Schöning, Matt Jones, Shaun Lawson, and Patrick

Olivier. 2017. HCI, Solidarity Movements and the Solidarity Economy.

In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Com-

puting Systems (Denver, Colorado, USA) (CHI ’17). ACM, New York,

NY, USA, 3126–3137. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025490

Abstract

This research seeks to address detrimental effects of the environmental light pollution by developing intelligent lighting networks that can support nonhuman as well as human needs. The significance of this research is clear from one dramatic contradiction. On one hand, all life on the Earth has evolved to depend on darkness. Ecological evidence shows that harmful effects of light pollution are pervasive and affect all organisms, including humans. [1] On the other hand, human societies crave more light to maximise economic activities. As a result, artificial sources of light at night are increasing by 6% every year. [2] Codes and standards of current lighting design often fail to acknowledge the environmental impact as evident, for example, in the Australian lighting standards [3] and local-council lighting strategies. [4] Existing design trends [5] do not acknowledge the needs of nonhumans or provide systems that can flexibly adapt to their behaviours. Computational analysis, simulation and interactive visualisation provide opportunities to reassess such approaches. We use these tools to ask how design can address the damaging misalignment of nonhuman needs and human preferences for light. In response, our project claims that computational analysis, simulation, and immersive digital media can combine human and nonhuman input to support better design. To test this proposition, this study 1) assesses scientific evidence on the impact of light; 2) reviews current and emerging lighting designs; 3) develops a conceptual framework for more-than-human design in application to lighting; and 4) tests this framework in a concrete design experiment that considers an intelligent lighting network for characteristic urban sites. Our results demonstrate that data-driven simulations, immersive interactive visualisations, and persistent multi-modal input systems can extend design imagination. Our approach supports nonhumans stakeholders in several ways:

1. Through guardianship where human experts defend nonhuman interests during design negotiations.

2. Through the information on nonhuman behaviour and ecosystem dynamics that constrain simulations and guide designs.

3. Through real-time feedback about the consequences of design decisions, rendered from points of view of human and nonhuman stakeholders.

In contrast to nonresponsive and anthropocentric lighting systems, the proposed intelligent lighting network uses smart luminaires and mobile-device controls to adapt to the uncertain dynamics of urban ecosystems. It achieves this by using a combination of baseline data and observations of human and nonhuman behaviours. This research contributes to knowledge about urban ecologies and develops novel options for urban rewilding. It does so by highlighting the damaging effects on light and proposing an innovative approach to lighting design. This approach broadens the scope of possible implementations, demonstrating their plausibility, and formulating concrete research questions about ecological, social, aesthetic, economic and risk-related aspects of interspecies lighting-design.

References

[1] Kevin J. Gaston et al., “Impacts of Artificial Light at Night on Biological Timings,” Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 48, no. 1 (2017): 49–68, https://doi.org/10/gc5vsg.

[2] Franz Hölker et al., “The Dark Side of Light: A Transdisciplinary Research Agenda for Light Pollution Policy,” Ecology and Society 15, no. 4 (2010): 1–11, https://doi.org/10/gfsqcr.

[3] Joint Technical Committee LG-002, “Australian/New Zealand Standard, Lighting for Roads and Public Spaces - Pedestrian Area (Category P) Lighting - Performance and Design Requirements,” AS/NZS Standard 1158.3.1:2005 (Standards Australia/New Zealand, 2005).

[4] City of Melbourne, “Public Lighting Strategy” (Melbourne: City of Melbourne, 2013).

[5] Joanne Entwistle and Don Slater, “Making Space for ‘the Social’: Connecting Sociology and Professional Practices in Urban Lighting Design,” The British Journal of Sociology 70, no. 5 (2019): 2020–41, https://doi.org/10/gjtvf8.

Abstract

We live in an era of profound technologically mediated transformation of how to plan, govern, use and co-exist in the city. Yet discourses on the so-called smart cities continue to revolve around notions of linear progress, upholding a belief in algorithmic technologies as tools that solve urban problems through optimization. Often the focus is on the human(ist) side rather than plainly emphasizing technocratic efficiency. There is also plenty of “general talk” that uses smart as a synonym for good planning, governance, and democratic participation. These views are based on technical or practical knowledge interest, i.e., aiming for optimally operating, livable cities.

What the above discourses miss is the urban material, technical, experiential, and social complexity. To capture this complexity, it is more fruitful to view cities as cybernetic systems evolving through transitions, as happened during the industrial revolution. Today, yet another transition is under way, challenging the entrenched conceptions of how technologies, cities and us humans relate. Consequently, we need to break loose from the double bind of solutionist technocracy and critical humanism.

Technologies, humanity and urbanity co-evolve: intertwined with our tools and cities we enter new ontological territories, constantly expanded by the human capacity to build ever more advanced instruments, in a circular loop. In the future we may have, for example, sense prostheses that tell us time, provide directions, enable ‘telekinesis’ and allow us ‘see’ through matter – perhaps even affording our bodies to sense sea-level rise or C02 levels, thereby wiring us with the planet Earth.

Technology is woven into “being human” on an individual level, but even more so in terms of complex adaptive metasystems. These can be addressed with the notion of cognisphere which refers to densely intermeshed assemblages of data, algorithms and humans. In cognisphere, humans not merely operate the smart urban cybernetic networks or are regulated by them; with and through ever-interactive, responsive and self-regulating technologies we integrate and contribute corporeally to human–technology and technology– technology communication. Indeed, we become living sensors in the networked cognisphere.

In such a metasystem, humans participate through embodied action in cybernetic feedback loops. This transforms the idea of urban citizenship. Humans are indistinct from the city, they enact urban functions, flickering as blips in the computational environment. An emblematic feature is humans appearing as avatars that incessantly reproduce themselves in a variety of game spaces, platforms and forums, existing in multiple “places” simultaneously, forever. Our being virtual and corporeal interlace, entwining in countless ways time, space, and identity.

We suggest that the designed urban technological systems that evade the street-level perception incrementally co-construct complex human–machine and machine–machine constellations inhabited by netborg avatars: densely interrelated virtual-corporeal organisms. Hence, the premises for planning, governing, and, overall, anticipating urban future(s) cannot be grounded in linear forecasts, optimization, and risk management, but should remain open to accommodate potential evolutionary shifts in their process of becoming. This calls urgently for more philosophical and imaginative approaches in urban studies to complement and challenge the paradigms of engineering and critical humanism.

Literature

Allenby, B. & Sarewitz, D. (2011) The techno-human condition. Cambridge & London: The MIT Press.

Clark, A. (2004) Natural-born cyborgs: Minds, technologies, and the future of human intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cugurullo, F. (2020). Urban artificial intelligence: From automation to autonomy in the smart city. Frontiers in Sustainable Cities, 2(38), 1-14.

Gabrys, J. (2016). Program Earth: Environmental sensing technology and the making of a computational planet. University of MInneota Press.

Gandy, M. (2005). Cyborg urbanization: Complexity and monstrosity in the contemporary city. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29(1), 26-49.

Haraway, D. (1991). Simians, cyborgs, and women: The reinvention of nature. New York: Routledge.

Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Cthulucene. Durham & London: The Duke University Press.

Hayles, N. K. (2006). Unfinished work: From cyborg to cognisphere. Theory, Culture & Society, 23(7-8), 159-166.

Hayles, N. K. (2017). Unthought: The power of the cognitive nonconscious. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Jonhnston, J. (2008). The allure of machinic life: Cybernetics, artificial life and the new AI. Cambridge & London: The MIT Press.

Mathez, Judith (2002). Von Mensch zu Mensch. Ein Essay über virtuelle Körper realer Personen im Netz. Article online (30.04.2015): http://www.dichtung-digital.de/2002/11/10- Mathez/index.htm

Mitchell, M. (2009). Complexity: A guided tour. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Zylinska, J. (2002, ed.). The cyborg experiment: The extensions of the body in the media age. London & New York: Continuum.

Abstract

The presentation discusses the experimental development of a virtual reality tool that adjusts the field of view and scale of the user in relation to other species to promote landscape architectural competencies in experiencing and engaging the multispecies city. Within the constraints of a practice-based masters of LA degree, the research aims to both expand upon, and to a degree counter, the prevailing anthropocentric scopic tendencies of the imaging tools underpinning landscape architecture. This intent is given momentum by the need to progress representational tools that meet the demands to imagine a more-than-human city. The research thus wants to test the potential of a virtual reality that manipulates the field of view and scale of the user to cultivate empathy and potentially reciprocity towards the more than human within design process. To that end I ask how this tool can give digital presence to support the accommodating of more than human life forms and their worlds within design development. A coastal site in Porirua, Aotearoa New Zealand is selected to develop the digital interface.

A demonstration of Titahi Bay will be presented in VR with an altered view.

Abstract

Humans' contact with the natural environment is the central theme around

which the game in my Master thesis is structured. The protagonist is a small Hedgehog that

lives in close proximity to people in a garden in an average Belgian suburb. Autumn is

approaching, as a young hedgehog it is time to learn how to forage, there is a whole new

environment to explore.

The world starts as a dark gray place, can you bring colour to it. Will you venture outside your

burrow? How do you experience an abundance of stimuli, new smells and objects on your

route? What human obstacles make it difficult for you? Danger is always lurking around the

corner.

By playing the game through the eyes of a young hedgehog, the player experiences the world

of an animal that lives close to its own environment but is perhaps not or hardly part of it.

Nevertheless, as human beings we bear responsibility for our environment and all the

species in it. After all, we are only one of these species. If biodiversity declines, this has an

impact on our quality of life. Through the game experience, the player can become aware of

the fact that through small interventions, such as adaptations in and around the house for

small mammals, they can contribute to stopping the loss of biodiversity.

Abstract

Within the last decade, known as maker spaces, fab-labs, or maker cafes, spaces where non- professionals can build things using computers, machines, and tools have spread across the globe. Profiting from the popularity of shows such as Robot Wars and print media like Maker Magazine, maker spaces have become hubs where artists and hobbyists interact. Depending on the equipment and educational tools offered, the possibilities of what can be made in maker spaces is endless. However, the materials used are not. Similar to many production spaces used by professional artists, do maker spaces accumulate unwanted waste and byproducts through unsustainable practices. Because maker spaces have a direct link to the public through their members, sustainable maker space can help to educate people about materials, the life circle of products and cradle to cradle production lines. The talk will take a look at different materials used in maker spaces, problems that might arise regarding their sustainability, and give suggestions for socio-ecofriendly practices. Although not limited to, the materials most used in maker spaces are [1] soldering tin, [2] wood for laser cutting, [3] acrylic for laser cutting, and [4] filament for 3D printer. [1] Trying to reconstruct a chain of custody for soldering tin, the talk will begin by highlighting the complexity of environmental Making. Generally, it is known that core solder used for electronic soldering is made up of tin-copper alloy. Among other miner components, wax from mineral oil and tree resin are also used and, like the mining of copper, their procurement does often violate social- and environmental standards. The materiality chain is so complex that even eco-friendly producers, such as HS10 Fair, struggle to meet transparency standards. [2] Due to the stabilizing properties of the layered wood grains, is plywood one of the most versatile materials. Like with veneer in general, do most suppliers not provide chain of custody (CoC) certificates. While this is a problem to be solved by the world timber market, understanding wood properties in relation to the life circle of tree species can help makers to better choose which plywood to use. Wellboard and Kraftplex may also proof to be good alternatives. [3] Acrylic is a fiber formed by the synthetic polymer acrylonitrile. Throughout its production and life circle much CO2 is produced and acrylic waste products are known to hinder plant growth, cause aquatic changes and respiratory problems. Currently, there are no green alternatives available. The best way is to use recycled acrylic or non-polymer alternatives. [4] From stone dust to recycled cardboard, 3D printer filaments seem to be the most adaptive to eco-friendly Making. Because of that, 3D printing is prone to rebound effects and negative net-CO2 emission rates, the two most common side-effects of implementing sustainable practices. Looking at materials used by makers, the talk aims to show that eco-friendly making is complex but has the potential to reconnect people with production process and natural resources. Looking beyond maker spaces, artists and creators should feel encouraged to spearhead sustainable usage of materials. Depending on the time available, I would like to close the talk on a participatory note by having other participants reflect on the life circle of their art/product by calculating the energy and CO2 costs and comparing them.

Abstract

As a form of media architecture, public displays are proposed to be opportunistic tools that can facilitate civic engagement with more diverse parts of the community in a contextually grounded manner. Common goals, such as sparking debate about local issues or gaining insights into latent community sentiments, are often facilitates through public polling displays that gather and visualize opinions.

While Citizen Dialog Kit was conceptualized as a DIY tool for such situated public polling, our ongoing practice has revealed the challenges in deploying these technologies from the perspective of the civic organizations that wish to use them. Organizations tend to require hands-on facilitation during multiple phases of a typical deployment, as the effective exploitation of all the qualities of a public polling display requires decision making on aspects that range from the architectural and technical, to the design and data analytical.

In this presentation, we will discuss these and other obstacles that complicate a truly DIY approach and propose potential paths towards overcoming these barriers in future research through the lens of a middle-out approach. As such, we hope to spark a critical debate about the DIY potential of media architecture for more equitable cities from the viewpoint of civic organizations.

During the 60 minutes workshop we will talk about location based stories from the perspective of other than human life forms. We will present our ongoing experiment Fire Keepers Map where we started to interconnect narratives inspired by spiders and bees with a network of Fire Keepers artists. Through their cognitive and web making abilities spiders are an interesting way to question how we are creating networks and listen to the others. Bees are opening the conversation on the question of orienting ourselves and communicating. The aim is to challenge our anthropocentric point of view and reveal how the intelligence of nature can inspire us to connect with nature and our nature with the use of technology and location based stories to understand places in a new way.

The practice will be: “spot in your direct surrounding another life form and challenge the narrative of your place from this new point of view”. Take a picture and write a description of your place from this new perspective and share it with the other participants of the workshop. Some guidance in formulating this description could be: what can I perceive with every of my senses from this place and how the place is responding to my other than human existence ?

Note: this workshop is part of a larger Supercluster spectrum of locative Media online games for environmental awareness. https://supercluster.eu/events/game/