Concept developed at first growBot garden symposium, May 3, 2010

Over the past 100 years, the practices of agriculture have been radically altered in Western societies, spurred by development and application of a host of technologies designed to automate and monitor food production. Recently, however, many have called attention to the shortcomings of mainstream massive farming endeavors — large-scale agri-business may be producing more food, but the food itself is lacking in nutrition and the environment is suffering from these very farming practices. What is needed is a return to local and small-scale agriculture for both environmental and personal health concerns.

Engineering and design played a role in advancing the culture and practices of agri-business by producing products, systems, and services to advance and support large-scale corporate farming. The question we ask is, Can design and engineering now play a role in shifting us towards more sustainable modes of agriculture? What kinds of products, services and systems would need to be designed and engineered to enable that subversion and shift? How will technologies of automation and monitoring need to be refigured for these contexts – if indeed they are still at all useful? The growBot garden project explores these questions by bringing together designers, artists, farmers and other food producers to ask: How might robotics and sensing technologies be used in support of local small-scale agriculture?

The growBot garden project is structured around a series of public and participatory workshops that bring together diverse constituencies to critically think about, discuss and debate, and re-make our near-term future. The workshops draw equally from practices of participatory design, critical design, social practice art, tactical media and hacking. More than a discursive platform, the workshops are design platforms: opportunities to collectively make speculative representations and prototypes of possible futures. These representations and prototypes are documented and shared through public forums to provoke consideration of new assemblages that might emerge at the intersection of technology and agriculture.

Events to Date
growBot garden symposium, 3 May, 2010

Upcoming Events
We will be participating in the Out the Garage program at the San Jose 01 Festival, September 4-19, 2010

How might robotics technologies be used in near-future scenarios? And how might we use design to critically examine these futures and explore alternatives?

Drawing from the capabilities and research themes of contemporary engineering and computer science, the Speculative Robotics project uses design to critically explore and express possible future applications, adaptations, and appropriations of robotics technology. The concepts developed project these capabilities and research themes into new contexts, from post-apocalyptic suburbia to urban farms. From this exploration comes future forms and functions for robotics, and just as significantly, critical reflections on our current social and environmental conditions, expressed through design.

BuddhaBot

Amy Cheng, Lead Designer

BuddhaBot is a speculative design project consisting of marketing materials for the BuddhaBot service. The BuddhaBot service addresses the need to escape from two of the most prevalent stressors of city life: noise and crowds. BuddhaBot acts as a hive for a distributed colony of firefly robots (which fly around the city, documenting data concerning noise and crowds) and as a central processor to analyze the data gathered by the fireflies. Places that have minimal noise pollution and little foot traffic are registered as LotusLocations. These LotusLocations are then transmitted to a localized information network called DharmaNet, which can be accessed via a WiFi-enabled device or the Internet. The BuddhaBot service thus provides users with timely information that enables them to find temporary retreats from hostile city environments.

View the BuddhaBot video.
View the BuddhaBot website

Domestibeasts

Cinqué Hicks and Delisha Peterson, Lead Designers

Domestibeasts are modular, mobile, learning social robots that function as nomadic domiciles for human inhabitants in a post-collapse suburban landscape. Domestibeasts carry human inhabitants in herds of 20 to 30 units in search of whatever food, water and other resources the territory can provide. Domestibeasts make use of the remaining suburban infrastructure, in particular commercial signage and existing roads in order to guide the herd’s movement through space.

View the Domestibeasts video
View the Domestibeasts website

Envirodrone

Thomas Barnwell, Lead Designer

The Envirodrone project is a creative rethinking and repurposing of technology currently being used in the production of military surveillance and reconnaissance droids. The project focuses on re-purposing military technologies for community based participatory sensing and community action. The project explores how technology such as this can be used in alternative environments and scenarios other than for military engagement. How can this technology be used for the democratization of information?

View the Envirodrone website
View the Envirodrone video

growBot Symposium

Laura Fries, Lead Designer

The growBot project is an exploratory, moderated conversation space between technologists, roboticists, engineers and small-scale organic farmers. The growBot project asks: What innovations might occur in the conversation space between these parties? Modern agricultural robotics are geared towards large scale industrial production – what new ideas could these conversations cultivate? This moderated discussion, scheduled for Spring and Summer 2010, is equal parts community building and exploration, cross-disciplinary education, and speculative design.

View the growBot Symposium video
View the growBot Symposium website

Huggable Garden

Hye Yeon Nam, Lead Designer

How we can express our love to objects of nature? The Huggable Garden is a speculative design workshop for children and adults to create kinetic, audio, and robotic interfaces from craft materials and hacked toys that allow participants to show their emotions towards plants, trees, rocks and other objects of nature. Currently, there are three prototypes for tree interfaces: a kissable interface that activates motors to make small robots come alive and amuse the tree, a huggable interface to embrace the tree and soothe it with sounds, and an interface to record voice messages to the tree that play back when the wind blows and the tree is feeling lonely.

View the Huggable Garden video
View the Huggable Garden website

Mall-E: Inscribing the nomad’s journey of life

Tanyoung Kim, Lead Designer

Mall-E draws the trajectory of nomads’ mobile houses and their sporadic messages on the floors or wall of Futroit Mall. Futroit Mall is no longer a place for shopping. Retail shops are gone. The emerging abandoned spaces are now ready to exhibit art work. The Mall-E system tracks the location of the nomads’ mobile houses. When a change is detected, Mall-E draws the movement with a unique pattern. The visual aesthetics of Mall-E’s drawing borrows from petroglyphs while also appropriating symbols such as brand logos and cartoon characters of the post-industrial age. The interior of the future indoor mall is inscribed with the data obtained from nomads, which depicts a history of their life. Via Mall-E, the abandoned shopping malls will function similarly to the ancient caves on which primitive men inscribed their lives.

View the Mall-E video
View the Mall-E website

POWER Booth

Ethopia Hewitt, Lead Designer

The POWER booth collects the generated energy of its busy urban surroundings. Alternative energy sources are being developed each day with the end goal of producing an affordable, renewable, sustainable source. One such source of energy is the naturally generated mechanical energy created from the vibrations of the city. Using piezoelectronics, the POWER booth absorbs the mechanical energy created from footsteps, traffic, and construction. It then converts it into electricity that citizens can use to power up their electrical devices such as cell phones. As cell phones grew in popularity the phone booth died. Many cities continue to have this unused infrastructure decaying in their busiest sectors. The POWER booth is designed to be installed in these relics and bring new purpose to these booths. They not only solve the new, common problem of dead cell phones, but also educate citizens on alternative energy sources bringing your city into the 21st century.

View the POWER booth video.

Ergosum

Vasudhara Kantroo, Lead Designer

The Ergosum project speculates about the use of dynamic heat sensing and robotics in urban environments to generate power. The intent is to leverage zones of excessive urban heat with the right technology to use this energy in public spaces. Through several design iterations, Ergosum culminated in a scientific/design manifesto about integrating specific technologies to generate energy from urban heat. The manifesto, named ‘Ergosum: A proposal for enabling electrically self-sufficient public spaces in Atlanta’ is aimed to address energy recycling in the city in a multipronged fashion. The Phase-1 deliverable for this project, documents one such way.

Urban Brownfield Remediation Robot: Reusing an abandoned and contaminated site.

Hwajung Hong, Lead Designer

Every modern city has an amazing amount of vacant, unused land in its downtown core—hundreds of acres in most major cities. This category of urban territory is referred to as a brownfield, a piece of industrial or commercial property that is abandoned, idle, or under-used and often environmentally contaminated, especially one considered as a potential site for redevelopment. How do we reclaim the brownfield for neighborhoods in a way that is flexible and contextually appropriate to the site in question? The Urban Brownfield Remediation Robot is a speculative design proposal to use robotics to evaluate brownfields and to transform them into viable and environmentally responsible sites. Through remote sensing, each robot analyzes brownfield sites by collecting data such as Volatile Organic Components (VOCs). The data allows the robot to decide the best remediation plan for the site. The aggregated robot modules then execute possible remediation solutions, which range from building a site separation fence to creating phytoremediation machines.

View the Urban Brownfield Remediation Robot video
View the Urban Brownfield Remediation Robot website

Prototype in development

In July of 2009, we conducted a 2-week robot design workshop in partnership with the Boys & Girls Club of Metro Atlanta, Youth Art Connection. Youth Art Connection is a specialized program within the Boys & Girls Club for high school students who are interested in the arts. It allows them to work with designers, artists, and arts educators.

Most youth robotics programs emphasize technical content; they are designed to teach the definitions and capabilities of components, such as sensors and actuators, and programming in the context of developing science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) knowledge. As an alternative, we are developing youth robotics programs with a different perspective and agenda. Through design and art, our goal is to work with youth to explore the novel views of the urban environment that robotics provide, and reveal and question possible future relations between people, technology, and the city. Our youth robotics programs emphasize creative, critical, and above all, speculative approaches to understanding and engaging with robotics.

Workshop

During the 2-week workshop, the youth were introduced to the basic concepts of robotics through the “Sense-Think-Act” paradigm. We worked together with the youth in a variety of activities, including exploring downtown Atlanta with environmental sensors to understand how robots might perceive the environment, and constructing basic kinetic mechanisms that reacted to sensor readings. After a week of introduction to robotics, the youth spent a week conceiving and prototyping robots designed to exist in downtown Atlanta. Rather than focusing on pragmatic applications of robotics technologies, the youth were encouraged to develop designs that speculatively combined their personal interests and desires with the near-future capabilities of robotics. The program culminated in an informal exhibition of their work at which they displayed and discussed their designs.

Concept design for a robot to live amongst bees

Concept design for a robot to clean sewers and search for bacteria

Concept design for robot to re-wild downtown Atlanta

Exhibition

Smog is Democratic - Video Still 1

A media installation on the representation of particulate matter.

Included as part of the exhibit Consequential Matters
June 15 – September 11, 2009 Global Health Odyssey Museum, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

To many, particulate matter might seem uninspiring. But particulate matter is evidence of life. As we inhabit and wear away at the city we produce dust and debris. As plants attempt to reproduce, they produce pollen. All of this together, and much more, becomes the material residue of life that is particulate matter. As a subject, particulate matter brings together multiple themes in contemporary society: our concern with pollution, the relationship between urban living and hygiene; the tension between scientific representation and artistic expression of information; and the desire to produce techniques of measurement against the threat of the unseen.

“Smog is Democratic” is a media installation by Carl DiSalvo and Jon Lukens that explores particulate matter through the medium of data and photographic visualization. It is not scientific—the goal is not to establish or prove facts. Rather, it is interpretive and expressive, with the goal of considering how the sources and measurements of particulate matter might be aesthetically considered and rendered in order to generate reflection, discussion, and perhaps even debate. The phrase “Smog is Democratic” is taken from the sociologist Ulrich Beck. While some have argued that such a claim is not accurate, we find the phrase compelling and appropriate, for it communicates that the air around us is both shared and contested.

The data visualizations are based on air quality, smog, and particulate matter data from 2008, maintained by the Environmental Protection Division of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. This database records both predicted and observed smog alerts as well as daily ratings of the air quality index. In each data visualization, the data are used differently. For example, in Distribution Over Time 1 the rating are mapped by date onto a satellite image of the city, while in Distribution In Time 1 they are used to generate the disruptions of the images in the video loop. The photographs present another form of visualization, capturing and using images as information about our environment.

CDC Installation View (image courtesy of Georgia Institue of Technology)

CDC Installation View (image courtesy of Georgia Institue of Technology)

The exhibition Consequential Matters was an investigation by four Atlanta-based artists of the consequences of urbanization, technology, consumption, indulgence, and globalization.

Peter Essick: High-Tech Trash

For a January 2008 article National Geographic article about the disposal of scrap electronics, Atlanta-based photojournalist Peter Essick traveled to Africa, Asia, Europe, and the United States. The global trade in “e-waste”—computers, cell-phones, and hard drives, to name a few items—has developed exponentially over the past 20 years with resulting environmental and social concerns. This documentary essay bears witness to workers in developing countries who expose themselves to health risks as they pull apart monitors or circuit boards to extract copper, gold, silver or lead. Essick also chronicles more environmentally responsible recycling programs in Europe, and questions some of our efforts here in the United States.

Mark Wentzel: XLounge x 3

XLounge x 3 is a series of cleverly-adapted Eames Lounge Chairs and Ottomans responding to the apparent consequences of the over-consumption of goods and materials of recent years. Designed in 1956 by the legendary American designers Charles and Ray Eames with mass production in mind, this iconic furniture has come to typify a particular standard for stylish and enduring design products. Artist Mark Wentzel invokes a more universal application in XLounge, alluding to topics of global obesity and consumption, and the potential cooperation among artists, designers, scientists and manufacturers to address such issues.

Carl DiSalvo and Jonathan Lukens: Smog is Democratic

Smog is Democratic explores particulate matter through the medium of visualization. As we inhabit and wear away at the city, we produce dust and debris. As plants attempt to reproduce, they release pollen. These and other processes create particulate matter, a residue of life. An investigation of particulate matter touches multiple concerns: pollution, the relationship between urban living and hygiene, the tension between scientific and artistic representations of information, and the desire to produce measurement techniques that gauge the threat of the unseen. This installation is interpretive and expressive, with the goal of considering how the sources and measurements of particulate matter might be rendered in order to generate reflection, discussion, and debate.

Environmental sensing in the Public Design Workshop

Since 2008 we have been investigating participatory environmental sensing and experimental information visualization through Public Design Workshop projects and classes. Although sensing and visualization are often cast as distinct fields and efforts, we chose to bundle them because from a design perspective sensing gives way to visualization: the data collected must be expressed.

In particular, we are interested in exploring environmental sensing and visualization as both mediums and practices. As mediums, we are interested in how sensing and visualization are structured by both the material and expressive qualities of computation and the material and expressive qualities of the environment. As practices, we are interested in how sensing and visualization operate as social and political endeavors situated within multiple cultural contexts and agendas.

Our initial 2008 Project Studio is documented online and provides an introduction to our work in this area.
You can access it at: http://publicdesignworkshop.net/ecoviz

Sensor date in ManyEyes

Demo Day Spring 2008