Role: Research Through Design (RtD), UX Research
Time: Spring 2022, 5 months
Summary
The concept of Smart Cities is increasingly being critiqued for trying to solve complex sustainability issues with the same progress-oriented and universal methods and mindsets that has led to many of the main sustainability issues we face in cities today.
In this master thesis project I explored ways to rethink how we design digital smart urban environments. I explored methods and theories that contrast traditional design methodology. I turned to more-than-human design to challenge the human centered and progress oriented mindset in urban design which is critiqued for leading to solutions that sacrifice other life for the benefit of human profit. I turned to critical fabulations and co-design to challenge the design methods and narratives currently dominating the smart city context.
This was a Research through Design (RtD) project where to goal was to create knowledge through design practices. The results of the project was the knowledge coming out of the process.
Per-Anders Hillgren
Professor in Interaction Design, Malmö University
"This is a thesis in the absolute forefront of contemporary interaction design research, building on posthumanism, critical fabulations, social innovation and co-design."
How can co-design activities with local communities help us think differently about sustainable smart city technologies?
How can non-human things in nature help us understand the city?
How can interferences in the current smart city discourse help us think differently about the future city?
Initial questions
The guiding questions of the design process.
The goal of this research project was to explore new ways of thinking about smart cities through questions listed to the left. These questions guided the design process and the methods used.
What more can a smart city be if local sustainability practices led the way?
I turned to an agricultural community in Gothenburg that already has different perspectives of what the word "smart" can mean for sustainability in a city. We worked together in a co-design process and their world and ethos guided the design directions of the project. They practiced sustainability in the city through reuse, maintenance, collectivity, knowledge sharing and living in "symbiosis" with nature and animals.
Research context
Field research
Turning to nature to connect between generations and to be resistant to exploitation.
Through cultural probes, contextual interviews and fieldwork I learned that the community turns to nature and non-human others like chickens, wild birds, mushrooms, and plants to connect between generations, to be resistant to exploitation, and to be able to achieve a sustainable lifestyle in their situated context. For example, they keep logs of the species biodiversity spanning over many years and use it as protecting arguments against the exploitation interests of the area, and people from three different generations work and learn form each other when collectively care for chickens.
Appropriating commercial technology to better understand non-human worlds.
I learned that the community use smart- and lo-fi technologies in unintended ways to augment their attention to things in nature that they can't understand through human perception and time scales. For example using a baby monitor to oversee the activity of unhatched eggs, using an "egg lamp" to see the health of embryos inside eggs, or to log species of birds, mushrooms and insects in Sjöbergen over many years.
Exploration
Experimenting with designs valuable for more than humans.
I took inspiration from what I had learned about the community's most important values, and how they used technology to serve their situated needs. I created prototypes that experimented how we could rethink the purposes of smart technologies for serving more than human needs.
One of the experiments explored how a smart surveillance camera intended for burglary monitoring could be reused as a bird log that sent notifications with videos and pictures of birds that was visiting a specific tree, as a way to highlight the importance of that tree for the bird species diversity in the area.
Experimenting with designs that visualise local knowledge.
In another design experiment I explored how new technology might be designed if it was designed to serve the needs for the community and the area they live in. I created wireframes of an app that visualised the relationships and dependencies between things in Sjöbergen. It explored how we might visualise local knowledge about how trees, fungus, birds and people are interconnected and dependent of each other.
The experiment was inspired by how the community used analog species logs as a way to visualise the importance of the area for biodiversity in the city, to protect the area from exploitation.
Experimenting future scenarios where sharing, reuse and maintenance are the values driving society.
In one design experiment we workshopped around a fictive future scenario set in 2025. In this future, society was grounded in all the values she had highlighted in her cultural probe kit such as sharing, reusing and maintenance. In the workshop, we imagined that we lived in this future and we ideated together on what kind of services, platforms and technologies we would needed in this world.
How can co-design activities with local communities help us think differently about sustainable smart city technologies?
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Co-designing with a local agriculture community created ideas and new ways of thinking about how smart city technologies can be designed to help us understand and connect with the non-human worlds around us.
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For technology to be designed with the intent to help us see the world differently, people with diverse perspectives on sustainability need to be part of creating them.
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The role of the designer in a smart city context is perhaps most importantly about designing the spaces where the design is happening and enable for more diverse people to be part of that space.
How can non-human things in nature help us understand the city?
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If we in a future smart city would design technologies that would bring forward non-human life and help us better understand other living beings, we would perhaps also start to listen to what they have to say.
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If the future smart city developed tools that could make us better listen to the world around us, non-human actors could for example help us understand the direct and concrete effects of climate change in the city which they will be first to notice.
How can interferences in the current smart city discourse help us think differently about the future city?
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Designing experiments, prototypes and workshops that interfered with the dominating design context within smart cities created new perspectives and raised new questions about who the current smart city is for and what is represented in the current smart city.
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It raised ideas of how we can use smart technologies to learn from nature about places in the city, it highlighted that smart technologies used in smart cities in many cases are representing
Results
Research insights
The outcome of this project consists of several contributions; a new alternative view on smart cities that builds on more-than-human design perspectives, a methodological approach to ground and situate design work within Smart City frameworks, and the insights answering the initial research questions, seen to the left.