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 learnings and knowledge coming out of the process.
Design challenge
Smart cities are often described as efficient, data-driven, and future-focused. But many of these ideas rely on the same thinking that has contributed to today’s urban sustainability challenges where human profit often comes at the cost of other life. In this project, I wanted to explore a different direction. What happens if we shift focus from human-centered design to more-than-human perspectives in the design of smart urban environments? What if we design smart city technologies that support not just people, but also animals, plants, and ecosystems?
Design opportunity
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. What more can a smart city be if local sustainability practices led the way?
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?
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.
Design experiment exploring value for more than humans
I took inspiration from what I had learned about the community's relationship with nature and each other, their methods to practice their values, and how they used technology to serve their situated needs. I created prototypes that explored how we could rethink the purposes of smart technologies to connect with nature.
One of the experiments was inspired by the community's unintended use of smart technologies. It 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 ecological value of that tree for the bird species diversity in the area.
Design experiment visualising local knowledge
In another design experiment I was inspired by the community's analog biodiversity logs they used to protect the area from exploitation. I sketched wireframes of an app that would visualise the relationships and dependencies between things in Sjöbergen in map format. It explored how we might visualise local knowledge about how trees, fungus, birds and people are interconnected and dependent of each other.
Experimenting future scenarios where sharing, reuse and maintenance are the values driving society.
Another design experiment was inspired by the values highlighted in one of the participants probe kit. In a workshop we set up a fictive future scenario set in 2025 where we imagined what kind of services, platforms and technologies we would need in a future where reuse, care and maintenance was higher valued that profit and efficiency .
Research findings
The findings coming out of this project led to several contributions within the Interaction Design research field. The main outcomes was a new alternative view on smart cities that builds on more-than-human design perspectives, and a methodological approach to ground and situate design work within Smart City frameworks. It also resulted in a few concrete design concepts as examples of outcomes from this new kind of methodological approach. Read my thesis for more detailed info.
