In Progress

All of the projects exhibited at the opening of Toward the Sentient City explore the future of the urban environment. Haque Design + Research created the Natural Fuse project, which wires plants into a network in order to both generate power and offset CO2 created by that power. The project addresses not only power generation and balance, but also embeds a community regulator option by creating a system in which if users cooperate on sharing power, the network thrives, if users overload the system, the network will kill off plants.

The project as it was implemented (as might be befitting a pilot or demonstration project) seems more concerned with public education than with technological affordances. The developers mentioned that the transactional model in which the plants are killed if overloaded by “greedy” behavior was inspired by a micro-credit bank in Bangladesh, where if an individual defaults, the whole group is responsible for that loan. The project works on the premise that “we are all part of the production of the city” (Urban Omnibus interview).

But this model explicitly designates actions based on ethical intent (the switch is labeled Off Selfless or Greedy) as opposed to straight power usage. Additionally, intentionally killing off the plant as a result of ethically-driven behaviors rather than simple overuse seems the opposite of useful. Rather than designing the technology in a way that aids the user in making the right decision naturally, the system embeds a possibility that is negative for everyone. In other words, the project acts as a teaching tool about community behaviours rather than as a functioning and efficient community power grid.

William Gaver states that people “perceive the environment directly in terms of its potentials for action, without significant intermediate stages involving memory or inferences.” This is an excellent explanation for why limiting access to smoking in public places has had a much larger impact on decreasing smoking than public education campaigns that stigmatized the activity. I would suggest that the Natural Fuse project in actual implementation would benefit an approach more in keeping with the “ecological” alternative introduced by J.J. Gibson and discussed by Gaver.

For example, showing a healthy plant for the switch in the Selfless position and a dying or dead plant in the Greedy position would be an easy symbol for users to understand, and convey the very literal effects of overuse. It would also not require an inference to make the leap to understanding that the greedy switch would result in killing a plant. Finally, the stigmatization of human action seems an unnecessary element, given the ability to design into the system a way to reduce human action to a sustainable level.

Of course, in actual practice, the plant network would be controlled by a much more sophisticated system of regulators than a simple switch. But a red light indicating consumption levels close to detrimental effect before automatic switch-off might be a more useful inhibitor than relying on humans to flip the switch. People are not always near a switch or monitoring their behaviors, and a self- regulating system may be more ecologically sound in practice than one that requires human action.

Posted on September 23rd, 2009 by DeepthiW
Filed under: Art, Media, School, Uncategorized