Slow Project

Final project log:

“To Forage is to find something in a slow and considered manner. The process requires knowledge and experience, things which are both gained over time. We usually associate the act of foraging as a way to obtain food. The scientific definition of foraging explains that “In order to survive, a foraging organism must balance out its energy spent with energy gained”. We took this metaphor into the digital space. Inspired by the narratives of Dunne and Raby we set about creating a scenario in which people would have to forage for power through finding old batteries. What would they wear, what would the world be like? I was inspired by the fact that “A study in Japan suggested that by 2030, the power requirements for digital service alone would outstrip the entire nation’s current generation capacity”. It revealed how scarce the seemingly unlimited quantity of energy really is. We thought it was interesting how these digital things such as wifi and energy all had a physical cost to them. We were advised to shift our thinking. This was getting too speculative and didn’t answer the brief.

We aim to re-contextualise the act of foraging. Information is so valuable. Nowadays we use google to find out everything, we are utterly dependent on the quick instantaneous source of seemingly endless information. Despite this, we only ever use the first couple of links handed to us. We also trust the information provided by these links without questioning where they have been sourced from and who they were written by. After researching how people found something out before the internet, we realised there was a much more involved, sometimes interpersonal method of gaining knowledge which whilst slower seemed a more rewarding experience.

In this series we introduce the physicality and materiality of foraging into the digital world to make the hunting for information a slower process. Does accessing information in this way feel more rewarding. Does the idea that it involves more active participation put a greater value on the information eventually found out. It makes you question the information’s worth before going to access it.”

My early research points:

https://www.wired.com/story/99-phones-fake-google-maps-traffic-jam/

https://www.artangel.org.uk/project/red-lines/

In all these links there is the idea of giving the invisible digital a tangible geo-spatial presence.

We also spent a lot of time looking at the links given on the brief. Ellis and I were particularly excited by the work of Dunne and Raby. I think this project was quite influential for us:

http://dunneandraby.co.uk/content/projects/510/0

It was good to get an overview and a dissection of what Speculative design really is by these figureheads of the area:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmibm20UsoA

We had the idea to represent the physicality and time of foraging in a digital context. We thought how we could show this visually. We related food to something that is almost equally essential for us today – information. We thought we could animate the links of a google search but they appear gradually accurately representing how long it would take to go and find a book in the library, or a professor in London etc. We saw the effectiveness of using an accepted infrastructure and worked on animating/mocking up google

Below are early experiments where I create clickable links that would take you to web pages I’d created on a wordpress site:

file:///C:/Users/cam8k/Desktop/slow/google-design-mockups.html

https://indd.adobe.com/view/fd803f64-45dd-4225-9ba4-417bb01211ea

I think it really sold it having this clickablity and interactivity, it would of been really impressive to have been able to code it in some way. However, in the end, we used animation. After struggling to find a consistency to the series and how each example related to a different distance and time we pinned the interactions to the more broader terms of foraging. After a quick lesson from Hibiki we all started animating various different ways to interact with the google search and links. I compiled these animations in a compilation video seen below and added the terms ” To pick up”, “To search”, “To tire” and “To hunt” reflecting the action performed in the digital space.