Vandal with
Care
Reimagining the Smart City.
Overview.
Reimagining the Smart City as a PLAYFUL environment for Children and Adults
Role.
UX research / UI Design
Timeline.
Team.
February - April, 2020
Max Zelinka
Prasana Kalanathan
Shristi Malla
Vera Hagleitner
Challenge
Bringing people together and improve mental health via play and creativity
Objectives
Design a playful environment/city were citizen can come together as one and paint their street so that they can have control over their mental health.
First Read.. Read... and Read
As team of FOUR we tried to read as broadly as possible about various approaches to smart city and city design in general; to find interesting projects and subversive ways of thinking about what the city means to us. One concept that stuck out was the ‘dumb city’, that focuses on improving lives by existing or even ancient solutions.
Narrowing the Smart City Idea
We narrowed our interests down to wanting to introduce an element of playfulness into a potentially optimised space. We discovered lots of research about the positive effect of play on mental health, which we thought was interesting because wellbeing wasn’t mentioned in any of the more serious, business-style visions of smart cities. This was also encouraged by localised, but successful projects and organisations such as Playable City.
The Concept
We saw an opportunity to bring people together and improve mental health via play and creativity. We decided on ‘street space’ as our main focus due to it being a key area for socialization and its near universal accessibility. Several techniques helped develop our concepts, from mind maps to visiting the Play Well exhibit to better understand the history of the concept of play.
to narrow the smart city Idea
Mind Map
Based on our readings and personal interests, we made a mind-map of what we thought were interesting facets of city life.
Reflection part 1: Opportunities for more triangulation
There were multiple difficulties with handling a project this broad. The first of which being that while we did a through the amount of reading, this traded off with conducting more naturalistic observations on the street.
We recognize that while reading has its importance in creating and inspiring speculation and design fictions, capturing more photos and videos might have lead to additional insight about existing interactions between people and the street.
The Vote..
Once we had formulated some initial ideas via Mind Mapping we were finding it hard to finalise the concept. Hence, we decided to vote on which ones we wanted to pursue the most.
Play Well exhibition
To continue with our initial idea of making the project playful, we went to "Play well exhibition"- an exhibition about the power of play, to explore the history of the play.
This helped us to learn about past approaches to playfulness and its continued relevance today.
The ROCK is COOKIE
One group member after the visit of "Play Well Exibition" mentioned that he grew up seeing a rock that would change overtime based on different events. It was used by the community to celebrate graduations, sport club wins, or the community itself.
Hence, we imagined that if layers could be washed away or could be revisited in some way it would tell a broader narrative, and each layer be its own unique story within that narrative. Similar to paintings under paintings, discovered through X-rays.
This lead us to come up a layered approach to our concept, avoiding destructive tendencies that come with street art and allow all stories to be told.
Crafting our Vision
As a result.... We invisioned to ....
Create a space for people to come together and explore their environment through creative means.
Empower them to create a shared present, history and future that can be re-visited and co-created.
Allow for an element of surprise, play, and new interaction in an otherwise ‘controlled’ environment.
A canvas that can be drawn on by both passers-by and residents, that reflects the uniqueness of the community and supports personal expression.
Let the elements play a factor in washing away, eroding, or lightening what’s been created, revealing previous layers.
Have fun!
Play wash the play ground
Another key aspect was creating a shared history by making past artwork visible: the art’s layers could be washed away and reveal past contributions. This was inspired by one group member who growing up would see how art on a rock would change based on different events and news. We then applied this to the street and found that through “layered storytelling” everyone’s stories could be told without destroying others, and could be peeled back to see different, broader narratives.
The City in Need
Nonetheless, as team we decided to place our canvas in the London Docklands area, which has a rich working class history and has metamorphosed over the last 30-40 years. We felt that the juxtaposition with the wealthy Canary Wharf development would be likely to create interesting contributions and enrich an area whose history is usually relegated to museums. We hope this allows the area to tell its own history.
Reflection part 2: Capitalizing on hidden themes
These steps were critical in providing a ripe ground for fabulation. By exploring play and personal narratives, things we previously thought we unrelated to the street, we were able to recuperate them into our design and enhance it further.
However these insights were gathered from things members in the group found interesting and insightful. We recognize that broader insight could have been collected by consulting real stakeholders, e.g. pedestrians, to reveal existing attitudes and experiences.
IDEA
In order to represent the idea, the concept was visualised onto the various arial view images of street of London using the Photoshop.
2. Here, four distinct streets meet up at a roundabout. This includes a community mural, abstract art by an artist, history and data. Each street will be able to tell a unique story.
3. Another interpretation is that puddles could behave as a portal where people would be able to experience another area, or it could reveal the past version of the street.
1. Puddles could behave as a transition, providing feedback to the user that an old layer of art work will be revealed after drying up.
First
Visual
One potential layer a community could create is a time dial concept where users could modify the street to reflect how it looked in the past. We did not develop this idea further, as it would have required someone to author the content centrally with less input from users. Though of course in our final idea, residents could just create their own historical depictions!
Reflection part 3: Street Art as a barrier or as chance?
Once we had decided on a theme, which was to enable residents and city dwellers to create and curate their own environment through an artistic but open channel, we needed to think about how people might use it.
Several questions arose from the first crit:
●Where would we place this installation?
●How would people engage with it/paint?
●What rules might apply?
●What could go wrong?
The Docklands
the notion of re-imagining the sequence of event as designer and thinking what would have happened, said or done.
We agreed to move it to the area just south of it, which is comprised of Millwall, Isle of Dogs, and Island Gardens. These are home to some areas of multiple deprivation, which do not usually benefit from arts or other publicly funded initiatives.
The area has also undergone both demographic and physical change, from shipping docks to homes for some of England's wealthiest.
On location in the Docklands
Exploring what an aerial view might look like if a whole area of a city had a canvas on their streets.
Fabulations
the notion of re-imagining the sequence of event as designer and thinking what would have happened, said or done.
Other questions we addressed through fabulations include the actual behaviour of users, and potential offensive contributions. How would this canvas sit in a ‘smart city world’ that strives for optimised interactions and monitored public space? Would it be able to support and allow a large, community-based, accessible-to-all version of often subversive spaces such as the Waterloo underpass or Southbank skatepark? We hope so - but it’s possible that it too becomes too burdened with responsibility and needs to be monitored. In this case, the question we have tried to answer is: who monitors personal expression and should it be monitored?
Addressing Fabulations
To address this, we created several artefacts such as an invitation letter to residents, a court notice for offenders, and visuals to show what this world may look like. Additionally, we needed to consider the current climate of social distancing - how can people engage with each other and an outdoors installation when no one is supposed to be outside? It turned out designing our concept for indoor spaces would inadvertently increase its accessibility. We propose to do this by enabling phones as spray cans to draw directly onto the canvas, as well as allowing remote submissions.
We imagine a world where...
(1) Local councils install the canvas on a street, which does not impact the ability to drive or walk on it.
(2) What is painted is up to the individual - as well as what is painted over.
(3) Residents and passersby can use their phones to ‘paint’ on the street, as opposed to spray cans.
(4) When it rains, or when the sun ‘bleaches’ out the canvas, previous layers become visible.
Residents may receive a letter like the one on the right, explaining the concept and setting out guidelines.
Over time, this not only provides a free, accessible, creative outlet, but also create a shared set of memories for the community that they can actively contribute to and revisit.
The images are from our model. This was partly inspired by an experiment run on reddit in 2007. It featured a collaborative pixel art canvas, where a user could place a single pixel every five minutes - resulting in lots of collaboration.
This would make for a greener alternative to spray cans which emit harmful substances. This would also closely emulate realistic usage and decreases the learning curve of our concept.
An illustration of a user using their phone as a spray can to draw a positive moment of England winning the world cup.
This would of let the street be more naturalistically grounded, with the canvas becoming a part of the physical world. Furthermore this would also take advantage of the properties that influence the street’s look such as weather, light and motion.
Remote Submission during LockDown
A Storyboard illustration of how a resident may discover and use the canvas during Covid-19 crisis.
The resident will be able to download the Creastreet app that will work as the platform where they can paint and make submission to paint their street. The app may be available Smart TV app version. The light on the mobile would work as the spray paint which will have the ability of changing colour.
The system will be programmed to scan through the drawing before uploading onto the street. If the art is wrongful then AI prevents it from being uploaded
The Final Visual
For example, a Street uses the canvas to paint their own bike lane, as well as a community mural. Someone has painted an anti-monarchy message - controversial!
A few days of heavy rain reveal an old Coca Cola ad on the Road, as well as a painting of Millwall manager Neil Harris.
How will the AI Detect the Art as BAD or GOOD?
When conceptualising about the way to remove street art, I researched regarding the mechanism for auto removal of the art considered to be “Bad” from the street. I came across the AI called “Deepangel” developed in the Scalable Cooperation group at the MIT Media Lab. Hence, I proposed on building an AI that is inspired by http://deepangel.media.mit.edu/ to engineer the surface of street so that the art that are considered to be “Bad” gets removed after being detected. Deepangel is an artificial intelligence that erases objects from photographs powered by a neural network architecture that builds upon Mask R-CNN and Deep Fill to create an end-to-end targeted object removal pipeline. It proposes on detecting and removing the object from the images that will be uploaded or from the social media like Instagram. Although this idea is applicable to the internet and the media creation, it has the possibility to be innovated for the AI we proposed for this project in detecting and removing the “Wrong” art from the surface of the street. We propose to engineer AI onto the street to remove unwanted art and message from the street and develop “New World order” for better City and better World which are much needed.
What is considered “Bad” and “Good” Art? How will the AI know the differences?
The difference between the good and bad depends on the evolving perspective, thinking, culture, feelings that the society undergoes. Hence, one way was to let the society and people decide based on their evolving nature toward society and themselves.
What I strongly believe based on how “Big Data” are utilised by the business, marketing and the organisation to analyse their customer for their regulation of the business; that this approach could be adapted into the AI we proposed on building for the project. Implementing our AI with the ongoing “Big Data” culture could build a solid foundation for the utopian nature of “CreaStreet”.
Analysing the information via such platform(obviously with the privacy measures of public) and implementing the AI proposed for the “CreaStreet” to be alert/ updated regarding the recent culture of art and people’s sentiment- can be an approach to differentiate between what is considered to be a “Good” or “Bad” art. The data being generated each millisecond, the AI can be updated in real time that will evolve the meaning of “Good” and “Bad” art until future.
Future Work
There are some aspects that we did not get to explore as much as we would have wanted, that we believe might have shed some more light on the canvas in practice:
●What is “Good Art” and what is “Bad Art”? How is it decided? The matter of evolving perspectives, culture , feelings, and thinking.
●Conduct more naturalistic observations, to understand how people interact with the street and how this might change. Interview or observe current street artists.
●Produce more artefacts pertaining to how people would interact with our design to encourage more thinking, including field studies and videos.
●Who owns the artwork and what permissions a user will have to edit/delete artwork
More reflection can be found in my blog here . Use password " SC123. "