Design by "What if?"

Speculative Foundations

As the date for our workshop drew near, our group embarked on an exhilarating brainstorming session fuelled by curiosity and creativity.

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Inspired by a seminar led by Nina Cutler from the Policy Lab, we dove into a speculative design exercise, aiming to explore the potential futures of smart cities and city farms through the lens of Spitalfields City Farm. The exercise helped us think of “what if?” scenarios and imagine speculative headlines, pondering the question: "What else could a smart city be?”

A city’s functioning includes various communities co-existing in order to work towards a benefit, let’s call the cause of this way of functioning a logic. Now, the “engineer’s logic”, as Saskia Sassen calls it, is one that I’ve been the most exposed to being an engineer myself. The engineer’s logic uses the citizens’ activities as inputs in a data pipeline, leaving little room for interaction or open-ended encounters. However, these interactions allow the citizens to feel in control, which is essentially what gives them power to create a history, a culture, an economy that the city thrives on. When there is little room for this interaction, the smart city becomes closed and has the risk of becoming obsolete as time goes on, like most tech does.

The ideas flowed freely, so much so that even with a dedicated facilitator keeping things on track, we found ourselves overflowing with inspiration! However, this overflow of ideas proved fruitful as we uncovered some common themes from them, laying the groundwork for the workshop. Feeling pleasantly exhausted from our brainstorming session, we took a week to delve deeper and come up with workshop ideas that could bring the themes to life.

After a week of independent reflection and research, we reconvened, finding that many of our ideas resonated with the ludic design principles we had previously explored. We wanted this workshop to be fun and engaging, a way to tap into participants' values and ideas in a playful way. Of course, with any creative process, some ideas had to be put on hold due to practical limitations and resource constraints like time and space. But the discussions were lively, and it was amazing to see everyone's creativity on display!

With all our ideas in one place, being a democratic bunch, we decided to vote for the three we liked the most and the one with the highest votes would be the winner. And the winner (drumroll please!) was… a farm board game! Well, almost. The initial concept involved participants playing a game on a map of the farm, with their decisions revealing their values.

However, after some careful consideration and feedback from our module leader, Sara, we realised this idea needed some tweaks. A board game would require a lot of upfront work in terms of materials and rules, and the competitive element of having a winner or a loser wasn't quite what we were aiming for. We wanted everyone to walk away feeling like they'd achieved something.

After more brainstorming, the concept evolved into a Farm Mapping Game! This activity would allow participants to create their own dream farm, letting them explore their personal vision of a fantastic farm experience. Here's where the "Ikea Effect" comes in. By allowing people to invest time and effort into building their dream farm on a map of the actual Spitalfields City Farm, they'd value their creation even more. This would provide valuable insight into what truly resonates with them when it comes to city farming. To add a playful, speculative element, we included a bonus round where participants could imagine and assign superpowers to different parts of their farm. This playful twist encouraged them to think outside the box and share their imaginative ideas.

One key takeaway was the importance of providing some guidance. We realised a blank map might be overwhelming, so we created a workshop manual. This manual included general instructions and inspirational lists of animals, plants, buildings, and vegetables already present at Spitalfields City Farm. Of course, participants were free to add anything their hearts desired as well.

With our workshop idea solidified, we turned our attention to preparing materials and resources, eagerly anticipating the opportunity to bring our vision to life. In the next post, I’ll talk about what the day of the workshop was like!

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