Myriel Milicevic

Imaginary To Dos Three inititatives for personal environmental explorations. Received: June 2007 / Accepted: July 2007 Abstract The information about our environmental conditions is usually collected by expert scientists, evaluated by politicians and mediated through different kinds of channels. Often this creates a divide between actually experiencing these conditions and understanding their meaning. This paper presents three potential to dos for people to explore the conditions and personal effects on their direct and remote environments: through playful environemtal sensing adventures, through learning about the origins of their food and through how they might use their own bodies for powering their objects. Keywords environment · air pollution · city · sensing · food · tracking · Right to Know · online demonstration · urban gardening · human powered

1 Neighbourhood Satellites [1] Go on environmental sensing adventures in your city! www.neighbourhoodsatellites.com/thesis Just as satellites monitor and relay their findings from one place to another, people could become probes themselves, searching for particles and signals within the galaxies of their neighbourhoods. Equipped with a mobile air sensing device and transmitter, people have the ability to uncover, examine, and share the environmental data that they collect. This data also influences the structure of a digital game world, where the parameters are closely related to the sensing activities.

Fig. 1 The prototype consists of two parts: in the one hand the satellite as sensing device and game controller, in the other a small video display for the game and other readout. A laptop computer is stored in a specially manufactured backpack.

The satellite as sensing device and gaming controller The satellite can be navigated in a way, just as kids move toy planes through the air. These movements control the navigation on the screen and are guided by tactile feedback. Combining the two features of sensing and controlling made the satellite a richer and more intricate interface, which is in turn more beneficial to the gaming experience. The satellite’s position in the hand is just as relevant to the game as the position of the player inside a space when probing areas for readings. Although not running on solar power, the energy levels in the game will slowly drop with increasing darkness, and eventually cease. At night, players will therefore need to find bright illuminated places to recharge - places that represent the light pollution that is generated by the cities.

The game Not being a scientist, reading dull numbers can be a very disengaging activity. Having looked at other projects that visualise air pollution levels [2], a major flaw was that the activity of sensing would become boring and usually not be intuitively understandable for a large group of people. My inspiration was much rather fed by experimental and engaging projects such as Natalie Jeremijenko’s “Feral Robotic Dogs”[3], where a pack of pollution sensing robot dogs were set free in contaminated environments. Using videogame as medium promised to suit those requirements and show the measurements at the same time in great detail.

Fig.2 The small game of the prototype offers a brief, but nevertheless challenging interaction with the environment on a virtual level. It is an entertaining way of probing, and gives an instant sense of what the conditions are like.

Fig.3 My dream was that with many people having such measuring satellites, a map could be generated of local air qualities – a survey much more from a grassroots view than from a scientific conception.

Findings Along the process, some people feared it would make light of a serious problem, when employing playfulness and humour to such serious matters. However, in the tests it succeeded very well to make people curious about air pollution levels around them and engage them, sometimes for the first time, in a more public discussion. I think this is the power of playfulness, that it allows people to lower their guard and approach issues that they would normally find too taxing to deal with.

Some comments from different testers: It is hard not to be contaminated, just don't seem to be able to escape! – Pei Yu We are coughing from dust but we are learning to shake it off. We felt like on an airflot flight." – Enrico and Davide "Despite the contamination, interesting experience. – Anonymous The thing I like the most is that it makes a game out of adding data to a data set. This is often the hardest thing to do when creating collaborative interaction. – Mike Kuniavsky

2 F.R.U.I.T. Know where your food comes from! With Amy Franceschini and Nis Rømer as Free Soil. www.free-soil.org/fruit Our food is travelling to reach us, and the environmental costs of these journeys are adding up. F.R.U.I.T. researches why we don’t know where our food comes from, with reports on local food movements and proposals for local agriculture in cities. Currently a third of the goods transported on the roads are food and agricultural products, and this number and the distance that food travels is rising. Not only does this affect the environment, it is also a question of the quality, freshness and nutrition value of the produce. While cities are often seen as set aside from nature, we aim to investigate the agriculture, which feeds urban dwellers. In cities where living standards are low, urban food production is not a leisurely luxury but a deep necessity. The potential for urban farming seems to be largely unused in most western European and American cities, but when you can have fresh vegetables produced locally and not transported 1000's of miles it is a better alternative, and creates more livable and less polluted cities. Urban farming can be integrated in a variety of ways, as a part of public parks, allotment gardens, rooftop gardens or on walkways. F.R.U.I.T. installation For the exhibition "Beyond Green: Towards a Sustainable Art"[4], Free Soil installed a fruitstand with info wrappers and posters, and the online demonstration The Right to Know! The Right to Know The online demonstration for your Right to Know, is featured on the F.R.U.I.T. website. There, people can plant a protestor with their personal slogan, propose ideas for urban plans and tell about their food values. All protestors can be browsed by city or growing activities to find potential gardening friends.

Fig.4 Protestors will change their appearance, depending if they live in the city or countryside, grow their own food or not. If people add their city and email address, other growers can contact them for shared gardening events Some of the slogans that people submitted: Food loses 70% of its nutritional value within 24 hours – Steve, San Francisco Let's save the seeds Say no to transgenics save earth – Valentina, Mexico There is soil under the city! – Pablo, Boston Sustainable production that doesn't harm biodiversity. –Hartmut, Copenhagen Next generation must know about taste and health food - Ana, Lisboa Some findings The F.R.U.I.T. website contains much background information and our personal investigations in California, Italy and Denmark. In the U.S. tracking back the origins of fruit was extremely difficult, with resistance towards making such information public, while in Italy large distributors have been very open: The less tastes there are, the easier it is to commercialise a product (…) and makes it easier to consume. – Italian distributor

Fig.5 The most important issue for the distributor is branding. Therefore nearly all the fruit gets repackaged into new boxes, which makes tracking back its orgins even more difficult. Also, it leads to an enormous amount of wasted packaging.

Fig.6 In the European Union, the size, shape and colour of fruits have to follow certain standards. This leads to a smaller diversity among fruit and vegetables, and people become used to an ideal “fruit look”. This is also due to standardized packaging. F.R.U.I.T. is still further developed and aims to give people more information about their food as they shop.

3 Human Powered Objects Workshop Power yourself! With Amy Franceschini as co-power dreamer www.neighbourhoodsatellites.com/humanpowered_ws

A growing number of everyday objects are now fitted with electronic features, making them dependent on standby energy sources. Mobile devices, toys, alarm clocks use up mountains of batteries each year. While technology so far has been developed towards a state of minimum human effort, this workshop explored the potential of using the human body itself as a renewable power source. Although powering objects with our bodies might at first seem like a ridiculous thing to do, on closer inspection we find many situations where the need to be independent from the grid is essential, and even growing. Not only in areas with scarce resources – also in industrialised countries there are strong motivations to generate one’s own power. For example, there is still a deep wish for feeling self-supporting such as in case of potential disasters, the wish to be wasting less energy or simply feeling more independent from the grid.

With devices constantly engineered towards less power consumption, powering one’s own gadgets could become an interesting option for the future: then you might not even have to make the extra effort, remain reasonably lazy and you could power your mp3 player just as you walk.

In a way, this is already possible and a lot of research is being done in this field, as for example the “Power generating backpack”[5], the DIY “Crank powered iPod shuffle”[6], or even large objects such as the “Pedal Powered Washing Machine”[7] at the MIT D-Lab – among many other projects which you can find listed on the workshop website.

Some questions this workshop asks How could humans become their own renewable source of energy? How many people could you possibly network into a power grid? What kind of new energy cooperations would need to be established among strangers when one human power is not enough? How does the personal power input change the way we interact with everyday objects? The results of just a few days of work show that fantastic things can be done when using our own bodies as power sources. A few examples:

Fig.7 Milk-Away uses the body temperature to warm up milk for babies. By Wouter Halfmaerten, Thomas Leterme, David Schenk, Dries Vervoort.

Fig.8 Energy on Wheels, a power generating shopping cart for homeless people. By Tim Pion, Kim Vanderhoven, Johan Van Stichel.

Fig.9 The Dynamo Mouse, powers a wirelss mouse through the movements you make with it anyway. By Ann De Keersmaecker and Ken Langenakens.

While some ideas might seem further out, they are all inspiring for a future with human energy input. For the students it was an enriching experience for their future careers as product designers. The workshop was held during the Interaction Design Workshop Week at the Higher Institute of Product Development in Antwerp, Belgium.

References 1. Milicevic, Myriel, Masters Thesis at Interaction Design

Instititute Ivrea (2005). Thesis advisors: Ammer, Ralph, Steiner, Yaniv

2. Steed, A., Spinello, S., Croxford, B., Greenhalgh, C., “e-Science in the Streets: Urban Pollution Monitoring”, UK e-Science All Hands Meeting (2003)

3. Jeremijenko, Natalie, “Feral Robotic Dogs”, www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/feralrobots

4. Smith, Stephanie, (editor), Margolin, Victor, (editor) “Beyond Green — Towards a Sustainable Art”, Smart Museum Chicago (2005)

5. Lawrence C. Rome, Louis Flynn, Evan M. Goldman, and Taeseung D. Yoo, “Generating Electricity While Walking with Loads”, Science Magazine, 309 (2005)

6. Torrone, Philip, “Hand powered iPod Shuffle” (2005), www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2005/03/hand_powered_ip.html

7. Raduta, Radu, Vechakul, Jessica, “Bicilavadora”, MIT D-Lab (2005)

_____________________________________________ Myriel Milicevic MA at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, Italy in 2005. Since then: Working with Interaction Design Consultancy Experientia in Turin, Italy Working with Prof. Reto Wettach, University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam, Germany Teaching workshops on toys and human powered objects Collaborating with Amy Franceschini, Futurefarmers on friendly community interventions and human powered ideas. E-mail: myriel@neighbourhoodsatellites.com http://www.neighbourhoodsatellites.com