After a heavy beginning of the week in involving a lot of sense making and meetings with advisors and fellow students we all managed to organise ourselves for 2 days of intense group brainstorming. It was a fun few days with some great ideas coming out. Leading up to a break we are having in the process to do another industry project, I will be clustering and developing a rough ‘roadmap’ for how to proceed with prototyping. Looking forward to making stuff!
Dropping a quick update on my progress so far in defining my design opportunity. Hopefully I’ll get this finished off by the end of next week, but here’s a bit of summary of my learnings, core interests and most important of all; PLANNING!
Busy week behind me this week. My research evolved into meet & greet with local gardeners and a business that specialises in a delivery box service in Denmark. There were some interesting take aways from all the experiences and I feel like I’m now ready to start a bit more of a formal relationship with a few people that I can identify as my target consumers. And luck behold I found out that a community of urban gardeners even exist just outside my doorstep in Orestad! Un-grounded boxes have been setup with soil for local residents to use to grow anything they want. Chatting with a guy around the site I learned that it was being set up in response to a massive demand from the local residents. Waiting lists are growing and growing (sorry for the pun). The problem comes that a lot of the land, even though Orestad itself is but a stones throw from farms and unused land, is not able to be used for growing directly from the soil because of real estate developers sitting on it to build more and more housing and business develops as Orestad ever expands. The trick is to make it something mobile like the un-grounded boxes. A clever solution that allows the gardeners to simply up and move when the developers come knocking.
This is how I see the long term future of such community endeavours. Instead of staking out a single spot in-between the buildings (land which value increases a lot as more and more people move into Orestad) in maybe that a new type of garden mobility will have to be created so that like gypsies the gardens can travel around the city grabbing sunlight, water and nutrients from the environment wherever it stops off. It’s an inspiring idea I think. But how could something like this exist? This may well be another design challenge that I face if I was to target existing urban gardeners..
Another key theme that seems to be emerging is the raising of awareness of urban gardening as an engaging, fun, fruitful (sometimes!) activity. I’ve lived in Orestad now for almost 8 months and I never new about the urban gardening initiatives just a minutes walk away! Actually this could even link with the idea of mobility. Mobility may provide the ability for urban gardeners to move their gardens around, simultaneously promoting their activities throughout the city. Can you imagine a gardener from Orestad settling his garden in Fredrieksberg and instantly causing a flurry of interest from people in the area to join in. On a long enough time scale we could be seeing emergent behaviour and a type of urban gardening not really seen before. Gardens that are dynamic, evolutionary and ‘synced’ with the “nature of the city”. It’s a nice vision and now it would be great to find a way to work back from it and develop product (or service) solutions for people living in cities now. A solution where you can start from your home. In any case it’s time to get the opinions, visions and ideas from those who have tried.
I also had the chance to check out the LIVING exhibition at Louisiana Art Museum north of Copenhagen. It had a amazing examples of this dynamism I talk about actually in action. Specifically the Burning Man temporary city in Nevada that gets rebuilt every year from scratch as a way for the participants to ‘reboot’ as they say. Get away from their struggles of everyday life and be free to express themselves as they want. In particular a case study that stuck with me was the comparison between the block city (apartment blocks of identical design and construction stamped on the land until all space is used) and the designer city (super star architects leaving their mark on the city with wildly differing expressions). What came out of this investigation was a nice notion. Why not combine the two to create a Modular City. One were expression is encouraged but in light of a few key standard principles so that buildings, cities, mega-cities of the future stay inherently ‘human scale’ and at the same time desirable. It made me realise that maybe instead of approaching the idea of gardening service or product in the home as a single object that solves all problems and makes it as easy as possible. A set of modular principles could be laid out in some way to provide an extendable, customisable system for learning, growing and sharing. Mobility and dynamism for the modern domestic environment. Interesting stuff.
So a bit of a hectic week ahead but I have it all planned out and am ready to go go go. Till next week!
After yesterday’s visit to the allotments I was jumped at the opportunity to visit the Main Farm/Offices of food-box delivery service, Aarstriderne. The company has made a name for itself in Denmark through it’s effective delivery of fresh, organic, locally grown produce to the citizens of Copenhagen. From this, and two much larger farms outside of city, the business delivers to approx. 40,000 households throughout Denmark.
The numbers are impressive and business is obviously doing very well, but I was more interested in specifically what the business was doing in fostering knowledge and interest in organic, homegrown produce. To my surprise I had arrived on a day where the Head Farm had turned into a giant activity area for three local schools who had come down to learn about growing, cooking and tending to the daily duties of the farm. A fine coincidence! The aim was to encourage social learning and appreciation for nature beyond the walls of classroom. Kids were encouraged to plant, tend and take care of their own bit of farm over the course of a season and at the end the produce was cooked into a multitude of delicious smelling dishes.
Among many things I learned from this visit, I want to just touch on this one key insight. The business promotes this initiative and organises it separately from it’s core business of delivery boxes; but maybe there is an opportunity here to provide the same knowledge and inspiration (as seen with the children on the farm) through the channel of communication they already have with many people in the city of Copenhagen itself.
There are many more insights but time is short and I need to get working on my design proposal! Check in for the weeknotes tomorrow for more on my thinking so far!
Today I took a trip to the coast or Copenhagen (Amager Strand) to have a look around the allotments there. I had been tipped off about it by some friends at CIID and thought it a good opportunity to kick off some immersion and see if I could make some contacts for any future co-design/user validation.
Approaching the allotments early in the morning the place was fairly quite with not too many people around. Plots had land on which people were growing an assortment of vegetables and ornamentals as well as a small shed in which they, presumably kept tools and materials for the growing season. It was visibly obvious that it was the end of the season. Some plots were withering away while others had a bit more care put in to keep them going well into the winter season (greenhouses and such).
Yet in general there was a wilderness about the place. It’s something I notice more and more in Denmark especially that gardeners appreciate the natural order by which their gardens/plots grow. Only exerting minimal control in ordering what grows next to what and where. As well, of course, making sure they don’t invade neighbour gardens! There was also a plethora of homemade constructions for greenhouses, trellises, potting etc. It seems there is a joy in both growing but also facilitating that growth but constructing their own rigs and beddings rather than buying “flat pack” as it were.
A solitary woman managed to jump out at me from her shed and say a hello upon which I started to ask her about her garden and the more formal procedures of obtaining a space in the collective. It’s been a very busy season it seams with a long waiting list for next year. And I can understand why. Almost immediately she tells me this she was showing me her rhubarb and boasting at it’s size this year. The people here are obviously proud and I’m left with the feeling, as I bid her farewell, that maybe there isn’t much that should be done here to change any of that.
Some interesting questions which I will take into my visit tomorrow with Aarstiderne.
Just a quick note. In the process of conducting my initial desk/literary research I have set up a tumblelog to capture a bit of a visual focus for the area that I’m looking at for my thesis.
For now it’s simply, “Ongoing research into the meaning of nature in an increasingly urbanised world”
We’ll see where it goes from there! Click the screengrab or over here if you prefer the classic way.
This week we officially started the first push of our final project and I came to realise I never wrote anything after the initial week notes started. Oh well, you know, life at CIID is evolving so fast it’s natural for things to be left behind.
Speaking of natural. Desk research this week has led me into a very interesting train of thought that could be useful to keep in the back of my mind during this initial stage of the project. The concept of nature has always been a mysterious one for me. How do you define it? What makes it nature? It’s easy to think of it as kind just the green stuff outside. In our parks and in our gardens. But recently I’ve read some interesting thoughts by a group calling themselves Next Nature. It basically says the argument comes down to intentionality. If there is intention placed on the modification of our environment by ourselves, humans, then it’s classified as culture. Anything that is unintentional, therefore chaotic and uncontrolled, is nature. Good so far? Hang on to your seat. If this is the definition then you can start looking at our world just a bit differently. Gone is ‘just the green stuff out the window’ definition. Now anything uncontrolled is nature. Even things WE created can be uncontrollable. Think traffic jams. Think computer viruses. These are things that have a behaviour about them that we never intended. They just are. They exist because of the complexity of our man-made world now. Well I couldn’t help think about how this it relates to the topic of my thesis. Somehow it talks about how, using this philosophy, our effect on nature is equal to natures effect on us. We are nature. And so is our technology.
This launched me into a never-ending spiral of reading about everything from spimes & information shadows to the biology of machines to why we should let robots and machines interpret the world just like we do. Very broad for now (and sometimes a bit off topic) but inspiring none the less. I’m looking forward to how these notions can be interpreted later on when I do some co-creation with consumers and gardeners. Right now I’m planning a bit of a schedule for my research and I’m planning to focus mainly on immersion to start with and then move slowly into idea generation and co-creation or user validation of some sort to quickly get through concepts.
Initially I’ve settled on a very rough first statement of what my design challenge is:
“A product-service that helps busy urban citizens engage in landless gardening by opening channels of communication to their plants, to the knowledge of caring for them and to other people”
It’s a blur for now but I can feel a few strands of sense binding it together somehow. Time to just get out into the city next week and talk to some people! Also of note is that I’m planning to meet the people at Aarstiderne (they deliver organic produce to your door) and have a visit over at their farm at some point hopefully. We’ll see how that pans out.
All for now, see you next week.
The Industry Projects have started here at CIID. First up are CIID sponsors Velux and Novo Nordisk in which the class is split to work on either one they wish.
I’m well underway with Velux right now and therefore it may be a bit quieter around here the coming weeks before our thesis project kicks off with the research phase. For now I’ll show what I can until word is given on how much I can actually put on the Internet. Confidentiality and all that jazz.
Back down to workshop for some more light studies!
Finally finished cutting together a new short video about the activities around CIID. This one from the GUI course about four months ago. Time flies indeed!
With the new video out and a bunch more footage sitting on my hard drive from other courses I’ve decided to start a little project. I’ve called it Busy Hands and I hope to make a few more short videos (sticking to around 1 minute is my only brief) highlighting the amazing work from the talented students here in the coming months.
