Requirements

Follow these requirements for your citizen science activity:

• Kin. Design an activity that affords getting to know the land through observation and noticing. Elevate details of the place that show (or don’t show) livability. What organisms are thriving here (or elsewhere)? How do they act in the heat (or various other microclimates)?
• Vibe. The activity should focus on noticing the embodied meaning of what the sensor is collecting; what does the microclimate feel like? Invite people to attune and observe the heat, moisture, and other sensory aspects of microclimate / weather. Connect those observations to the implications for the landscape. Design for special attention to observing the contrasts between locations.
• Timing. Your activity should take place at each survey location.
  • The activity will take place after the sensor is set up and will end when the alarm sounds and data is collected from the sensor, about 20 minutes at each sensor location. Be sure to not impede the collection of survey data.
  • You can also design your activity to additionally take place during the transition from one survey location to the next.
• Space. Your activity should be consistent across survey locations to emphasize the contrasts and differences inside and outside the food forest.
• Audience. Your activity should appeal to a variety of audiences, from the general public to permaculture enthusiasts.
• Components: The activity should include the below components.
  • Activity. An activity for (ideally a group of people) observing place during the data visualization survey of locations inside and outside the food forest.
  • Guide. Include some kind of printed guide that makes tangible the context, meaning, and structure of the activity and observation to be made. The guide should serve as a means of helping the impact of the land on microcliamte tangible, and should serve as a memento / “seed” for the audience to further ponder the activity later on.
  • Relevant artifacts (object, interface, etc.) that support the ritual.

Successful projects will:

• Work for a variety of audiences. Design for an audience of the general public, or alternatively, an audience of gardening and / or permaculture enthusiasts (who understand ecological approaches to climate crisis, but haven’t necessarily taken the time to observe and reflect on its microclimate).

Concept

A description of the walk concept and a journeymap

• Using your research findings as constraints, ideate at least 20 possibilities for activity concepts (done in class)
  • Be sure to follow the constraints of the brief above.
  • Evaluate your ideas based on interest and viability, and get feedback for your best 3 ideas from peers, strangers, and professors
• Refine your best idea.
  • Create a robust description that rationalizes / explains your concept and its implications. Describe:
    • Goal of the activity. Describe your activity and its impact in one sentence.
    • Actions. What are the specific moment to moment things people will do? How do they connect to the brief’s requirements?
    • What interactive mechanics does your brief rely upon (play, contemplation, silence, interest), especially the ones you identified in your research?
    • Describe how your ritual meets each requirement of the brief.
  • Create a journeymap that shows the major phases / activities of the concept.
    • Include drawings of the major moments or key interactions
    • Include anticipated feelings of the audience
    • Include a little of the before / after of the citizen science event / activity. How is the audience transformed?

Concept

A plan and drawing of a data visualization concept.

Do the following, documenting in your process blog along the way:

1. Follow the method proposed in the Feral Data Visualization manifesto to ponder the meaning of the project:

   1. Situate. Ground this project in your own place as a designer by answering the following questions:

      1. Ponder: What culture, identities, worldviews do you hold as a person (and are willing to share)?
      2. What place, in terms of human and ecological history are you working from? (Check out the ecoregion resources below)

   2. Purpose. Reflect upon the point of your data set by answering:

      1. What reality does the data describe?
      2. What worldview informs the dataset?
      3. What purpose does/can this data serve?

      Note: no data analysis of any kind is required. You just need an awareness of the kind of data supplied, and how it was created.

   3. Attunement. Speculate or research what flow of feelings:

      1. Lets you into the reality described by the data
      2. Rings true to its purpose.

      You can look at how people make sense of this data already (without data viz), paying specific attention to what physical feelings and metaphors might help.

      Draw out this flow of feelings, annotating the interstitial transitions between.