INM_391: Creativity in Design Workbook

Thoughts, inspirations and design ideas tracking the re-imagining of a Smart City

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“[T]here are as many possible worlds as there are series of things that can be conceived that do not imply a contradiction.” ― Leibniz

Are we in the best one?

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My drone video of a living breathing London, shot from Peckham. 

London has the ambitious goal to be the smartest city in the world by 2020. To achieve this, the mayor of London is encouraging participation from both the public and private sectors. What might this look like? How can we open up the design space to benefit London’s city dwellers?

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I. The Smart City: The Foundations

“Creativity is not just about Design - it is one of the most important human qualities. It is the core value of innovation. Thereby it is an essential necessity that every human should develop” — Milella

The first lecture of this module was interesting for me, I didn’t really know what to expect, especially after the Smart City brief was introduced. As a user researcher, when reading the project brief, my first thought was to use the double diamond method to define the ‘problem’ of the smart city; and how to ‘solve’ it to improve the lives of its dwellers.

After seeing some of the group project examples from the previous years, my mind started to race with ideas for how to ‘fix’ the city. Within a few minutes, those ideas were quashed. Some of the ideas presented didn’t dig deep enough because they were very much stuck in the problem/solution cycle, possibly deprioritising the space around the problem. This caused me to think deeply about what this module requires. 

It’s evident that creativity is a beautiful thing, but it is easy to run away with an idea without considering the wider impact on those that interact with it. What do they think about? What do they feel? Why do they feel that way? Will they use a design the way it was intended to be used? Should there even be an intention? Maybe design doesn’t need to be built on a problem that can and should be solved, but instead on opening up a design space to spark discourse and action.

Creativity started from the way project groups were chosen (using playing card faces and suits!), and such creativity should continue throughout the project to fuel innovation. 

As a group we discussed ground rules, establishing our foundation for ways of working to ensure creativity could flourish, which I thought was really important. We identified skills in Photoshop, a liking for Google Docs and Slack and that Mondays were the least favourable day to meet in person. It gave me a chance to understand the people I’d be exploring with (Chris, Disha and Tania), and how we can get the best out of each other for design - if only as a starting point. 

We agreed, we’d benefit from creating a safe space to share our biases and assumptions and get comfortable with constructively critiquing our own and each other’s ideas. We also agreed we’d need patience, humility and respect for one another’s processes. This reminded me of a paper by Boeijen and Stappers (2012) about how designers from different cultures approach design, encounter groupwork difficulties and overcome them. Some designers put more time and focus into different parts of the process which caused friction in places but through listening, an understanding was built and a mutual goal was achieved. 

My take on Stapper’s description of the design approach

Like them, our journeys to the final output may differ, as we have different frames of reference. There may be multiple points where our ideas converge however, there will be times when our thoughts diverge which will lead to us checking in with, teaching and learning from each other; as well as practising the art of compromise. All of this is important to drive creativity, iteration and change. 

All being said, I’m a little anxious about moving beyond the double diamond to try a new shape, but I have to remember that creativity doesn’t happen in a void. I’m now part of a team with strengths in code, research, design and wordsmithery. I’m excited about how we’ll come together, the paths we’ll take and the final smart city output if any, that will come from our collaboration.

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Unexpected events act as catalysts for change. With Tokyo 2020 postponed until 2021 or further, I wonder how the impact the coronivirus pandemic will shape its future design. Thinking furthur into the future, what might Tokyo 2099 look like? What if cities were pandemic-resistant?

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II. The Smart City: Multiple Worlds in Progress

“It’s not just about the four walls. You’re creating a community for people to live in.” ― Christopher Coboldon

December 31st 1999, 23:59:56. 

We were seconds away from a moment that we had all been waiting for, the turn of the century. What will happen to computers? Will vehicles be replaced with hover cars? Will we finally get robot servants so we never have to move again? After all the buzz, the clock struck 00:00 and... nothing happened. 

Predicting and forecasting the future is an idea that has consumed humans for millennia. From Côté’s 1899 depictions of scientific advancements imagined as achieved by the year 2000, Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s 1984 and Hollywood’s dedication to the production of 581 futuristic films, we’ve dared to dream about possible words. 

3/91 of Côté and other artists’ depictions of the year 2000

Dunne and Raby (2015) argue that these dreams are powerful tools that propel us towards actualising these worlds. In 1931 Huxley wrote about a World State, outlining a futuristic society revolving around science and efficiency; while Orwell wrote about a state surveilled by the ever-watchful eye of ‘Big Brother’, drones and in-house motion detectors. Today, in some form, these descriptions are a reality. 

Through advancements in science and technology, we are injecting intelligence into every part of our lives, using big data to tackle issues related to crime, waste removal and road congestion. With the UN’s understanding that almost 70% of humanity will be city dwellers by 2050, and more than 40 mega-cities with a population over 10 million people, the idea of a ‘smart city’ is favourable (Thornton, 2019). Building a smart city using citizen data can be used to help the public visualise the status of the city, stimulate citizen participation for improvements and increase government transparency (if these exist in the future). Countries such as Portugal, Brazil, Dubai and South Korea are designing smart cities to achieve these worthy goals. 

However, this thinking in this way would put me back into the problem-solution cycle. Rather than designing for problem-solving, or giving up altogether, I’d like to adopt a tool Dunne and Raby call speculative design.

Upon reading about Dunne and Raby’s speculation cones I immediately thought of an eye looking out on the horizon. 

The gaze looking far into the distance through a little fuzzy focusses on the future where anything is possible. Slightly closer and a little more in focus looks to something that is plausible, and up close with clarity is something entirely probable. I like the cone that focusses on the fuzzy area where rules don’t apply. Here is where true creativity can happen, where the future is undetermined and is malleable and unpredictable. This is the space I want to design in, in could; rather than should, and is. I’m slightly critical about the preferable space. Who decides what that is? How long does preferable remain so? Perhaps I’ll find out as the project progresses.

As a group, we need to speculate wildly to identify the best possible world. As Jain (2017) explains, there are many possible futures. We need to find the “murmurs of future potential” and follow those leads to imagine what it would feel like to live in that future and feel the impact of those possibilities. It isn’t about predictions but creating tools. Perhaps, the lack of speculation might explain why Côté’s Aerial Fireman never got off the ground. 

We have the choice to be passive about the future or the choice to shape it. I want to take on these lessons to think about how to bridge the gap between now and tomorrow, moving beyond hope towards action, to ensure that we might design future cities where it’s dwellers don’t just survive but thrive.

Since the first lecture, I’ve started to speculate, taking inspiration from all aspects of my life including internet surfing, TV watching, memes, music, poetry, stacks upon stacks of books, art, satirical cartoons, existing smart city initiatives, politics and general observations of everyday London documented in lists and a ‘braindump’ mood board to add images whenever I’m inspired. I look forward to sharing this with my group, hearing their thoughts and ideas and explore the re-imagining of our smart city.

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A drone shot of my fiance and I in a field. How would a drone feel being surveilled?

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III. The Smart City: Surveillance State

“Smart is not just a word; it's an attitude.” ― Ogwo David Emenike

Modern-day Sims in ‘the Good Place’

In the 90′s I was addicted to playing games on the family computer. I’d come home from school, do my homework, rush my dinner, then play The Sims until my parents told me to go to bed. There was something amazing in pausing and fast-forwarding time, creating and deciding fates, watching their every movement. There was also the level of satisfaction in achieving 100% citizen health, happiness, comfort and fun. I was a God. At points, though I felt a little intrusive. I knew when they went to the toilet, showered and slept. Without consent, my Sims were under 24-hour surveillance. What might that be like?

Fast-forward to 2020 and the Internet of Things has exploded, creating the greatest mass surveillance infrastructure known to man. My location tracked by Google. My eating habits logged by MyFitness Pal. My words eavesdropped by the ever-present Alexa. My viewing pleasures watched by my smart TV and sold to the highest bidder. Although I am responsible for some of these choices and take comfort in knowing my life is often made easier, there are many times where monitoring is happening without my knowledge; meaning the ‘smarts’ that serve me, in fact, control me. When this occurs, I am not a person, but a thing. A sim. 

To immerse myself in this thought, using my drone, I recorded myself and my fiance taking a stroll in a field. The drone flies silently 400 feet in the air, barely detectable to the eye. If this was a smart drone, data about my relationship, my actions my clothes, my location, my hair products and even my air quality could be monitored and shared. You could argue that a city holding so much information would lead to one that is sentient, but what does it really know about me? Like the drone, the city can see the what, but not the why. 

This begs the question, how smart are smart cities?

A society that is truly smart would account for the thoughts and feelings of its community and adapt as a result of this. This made me think about a prominent topic in the news about the push to implement automatic face recognition on London’s CCTV cameras. This led to the developments of masking materials like makeup and holograms designed to take citizens off the surveillance grid. 

Citizens using CV Dazzle makeup paint to rebel against facial recognition in the capital

Citizen using the hologram of another face to camouflage themselves against surveillance

I set myself the challenge of documenting being under surveillance in the city, taking time to scribble a quick note whenever I felt the presence of being watched. Gathering my notes, I was inspired to create a quasi-collage/diary to group my thoughts and reflect on my experience during the crafting phase, something which Rose (2015) explains is beneficial for drawing out meaning.

My week under surveillance

Creating the collage/diary helped me to realise how surveilled my life really is.  However, I don’t feel this is a terrible thing; it would be silly of me to think so based on the benefits of safety and security. However, it’s no secret that existing smart cities have been designed using a top-down approach benefiting the companies that capture our data for capital gain. Using the guise of ‘smart city’ citizens are being ground down and shaped into cookie-cutter forms to conveniently influence their unique behaviours and activities, rather than monitor behaviour. The thought easily provokes the spooky feeling that Big Brother is watching you. What if the smart city didn’t consider the camera at its core as the smartest and most coveted sensor?

When we re-imagine the smart city, as a group, it’s important for us to respect those that we’re designing for because without citizens, there’s no city. If we are to help fulfil the mayor of London’s ambition to become the smartest city in the world, we need to go beyond monitoring and start listening.

What would a smart city be like if we avoid capitalising on behaviours and focus on thoughts? How do we design a city that protects and preserves them? Sentience isn’t something that smart cities cater for yet, but they could. Smart cities can be as intelligent as they sound, as long as we truly build them by treating city dwellers as an end, rather than a means to an end.

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How might we help others whose stories have fallen through the gap?

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IV. The Smart City: Mind the Gap

“A different point of view is simply the view from the place that you’re not.” ― HSBC 

It’s easy to experience something in the world and create your own interpretation. On a small scale such as my sketch of St. Paul’s Cathedral, it’s harmless.

An impromptu sketch of St. Paul’s on a visit with my fiance

On a grand scale, it can lead to the silencing of a community, the loss of customs and ideas, and thus an incomplete narrative. This begs the question, who gets to decide which narratives are important or otherwise? By default, dominant ideas, ideals and stories are perpetuated by those in power, essentially deciding how society and by proxy inhabitants think and function. As a result, alternative narratives are squashed and thrown into the ether.

A well-known example refers to the Atlantic slave trade in the 17th and 18th century. Unfortunately, we don’t know a lot about the true accounts of slavery given that the dominant narrative come from the perspective of slave owners, distilled and maintained through the classic medium of newspapers and literature. The enslaved were also pressured to forget their customs, memories and civil rights and forbidden from reading and writing. This made it easy to perpetuate the stereotype of a slave as ignorant, subservient and deserving of their station. Turning away from classic communications, if we look to other storytelling methods such as folktales, constellations, the underground railroad and the Arts, absent narratives emerge. As Harraway (2016) expresses, it matters “what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with”. What might it mean to slot these narratives and communications into the topic’s mainstream? If there is no narrative, can we imagine what that might be like?

When thinking about modern absent narratives, one that came to mind was the recent box office Hidden Figures. The biopic tells the story of three African-American mathematicians working at NASA who played a pivotal role in launching astronaut John Glenn into space. Despite the entire department being aware of their work, due to gender and race discrimination, their story was buried and credited elsewhere - an instance Hartman describes as “excluding designers and erasing ownership of their own legacies”. This narrative is one of the lucky ones that made it to the surface, 55-years too late.

Mathematic wizzes Dorothy Vaughn, Mary Jackson and Katherine Johnson portrayed by Janelle Monae, Taraji P. Henson and Octavia Spencer

Shelton, Taylor, Zook et al. recount on IBM’s 2011 Smarter City Challenge, which led to the development of the smart city initiative better known as Digital On-Ramps. This program aimed to improve digital inclusion by providing an internet-based education platform for marginalised citizens, with the hopes of improving their skills, helping them to compete in the workforce. Despite IBM’s intentions, the project overlooked the marginalised citizens' deep-seated socio-transportation issue, resulting in a failed initiative.

What’s the impact of absent narratives on society? Personally, I feel they stifle thought, creativity and development, which hurts us all. 

Smart City Challenge, Hidden Figures and countless other case studies highlight an important question for our group to keep in mind: How might we weave less familiar narratives into design to cultivate an inclusive smart city? How do we uncover the stories that have fallen into societies gaps? Rosner suggests that we are upfront and accept our biases, and challenge the existing design process itself using an approach involving alliances, recuperations, interferences and extensions. This process might encourage us to take a wider view on design in terms of who’s represented, who’s missing and how one idea thread connects to another. Borrowing from Ingold’s (2007) string theory, when we consider this, we can join and extend strings adding to the network until there are so many it is difficult to separate, difficult to tell beginning from end or storyteller from recounter, where one story is no more important than another. I feel this is what Hartman (2008) refers to when speaking about “flattening the levels and hierarchy of narrative discourse.”

At some point or another, we all fall between the gap. If people can’t climb out of the deep gaps that society has created, as a group, it’s our responsibility to use our strings as lifelines. We need to lower them into the darkness and allow others to tie on, to recover the unknown before it is too late. 

Our group met to discuss our initial ideas. The session was lively with books, digital mood boards, paper and articles sprawled across the table. The ideas for our possible worlds were vast, ranging from infinity pattern fractals, memory and waste to future voting, tube mice and lab-grown food. I was impressed with the number of ideas (81!) and themes generated and the fact that as a team we fully embraced the tool of speculation. 

By the second session, with deeper discussion our original ideas started to take a slightly dark undertone, talking about the illicit, taboo and things we may not see everyday. It was clear that, although our ideas we’re diverging, there was a general interest in under, underground and what lies beneath. 

I’d also noticed, although we hadn’t spoken about it directly, with the discussion of ideas, the word “London” floated around the room. It was unanimous that this was the home of our possible world. London felt like an ideal city due to its large population, cosmopolitanism and rich social and cultural constructs - all wonderful aspects to heighten layering it with the constructs of a smart city. Staying true to speculation, I suggested we take more time to explore the idea of the underground before selecting our smart city direction. 

I’m excited to find new strings to tie, to disrupt the status quo and open up the narratives in London’s existing network in relation to the underground.

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Dweller watching on the Southbank. I only saw one person pause by the river.

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A collage of 126 Londoners’, first thought of the word ‘underground’

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V. The Smart City: What’s in a Word?

“A word is worth a thousand pictures.” — Elie Wiesel

The well-known phrase is that a picture is worth a thousand words. We often view images and attach our emotions and life experiences to them, but what happens when we are given a word and a split second to ponder? 

As researchers and designers of our project, we have already shaped the possible future through our initial ideas and brainstorming from week one, and quickly moving towards the theme of being under. What narratives might we have already excluded? Although I’m a Londoner, building on Rosner’s views about missing viewpoints and reshaping narratives, I thought it necessary to understand the city from the perspective of its inhabitants. After all, we aren’t designing for ourselves.

After spending some time people-watching by the Southbank, I decided to do some guerilla research, asking “what’s the first thing that comes to mind when I say the word underground”. Within a few hours, I had 126 responses which I represented as a word cloud, in the shape of a wifi signal to symbolise interconnectivity.

Word cloud of dweller responses to the word ‘underground’

It’s evident that the underground provokes thoughts about more apparent themes like transport, but also less visible or tangible themes like death, homelessness, secret and illicit activity and tranquillity. 

Many researchers argue that visual materials can “reveal what is hidden in the inner mechanisms of the ordinary and the taken for granted’ (Sweetman, 2009). Looking to understand the threads around the topic I used everyday crafts around me to build an underground “web”, documenting it as a video to fast forward and rewind with the hopes of spotting new connections (a still of this collage can be found here). My purpose here as with all videos I’ve created so far was to be affective.

Video “web” of the underground

How could I situate myself with these ideas? I thought back to week one’s lecture. After creating the video, I closed my eyes and pointed at a scrabble word at random, choosing this as the idea to explore, investigate and fabulate.

Death in London

Living in Peckham, I was expecting to walk down the stairs and take a 30-minute stroll to take me near Nunhead cemetery. It was my first thought in connection to death. However, just 30 metres from my front door I came across a roadside shrine. 

Flowers laid out in Peckham outside my flat where two people were killed on 15th February at 5:45am.

Reading the yellow plaque, I was told two young men had lost their lives in an altercation. Unfortunately, it’s not an event that’s uncommon to the area, but I’d never paid this much attention to its representation before. What was the story behind their altercation? How would this be reported and by who? What lens am I putting on when I look at these photos?

On Monday 3rd October, 2011 at 4:30, 24-year-old Deep Lee became the 13th cyclist this year to be killed on London roads after colliding with a truck near kings cross.

A ghost bike representing Deep Lee who was struck by a truck at King’s Cross

Flowers and bikes act as lifelines to memory. In a way for as long as they are visible, the dead are still alive, their story lives on. How might a city keep that memory after the flowers die and the bikes are unchained? How might it allow the dead to tell their own stories?

What I find interesting about these images, is that they are both taken above ground, rather than below, their presence deliberately visible and juxtaposed against the living. What about the dead we can’t see. Not necessarily those that are in cemeteries, urns of mausoleums, but those that are undocumented and have never been registered as living?

What would it mean for a city to celebrate the dead?

Upon reflection, this was a very heavy topic that affected me mentally. I found that I couldn’t turn off my thoughts, seeing links to death in London in most spaces. However, this is a part of design, there’s great importance in speculating at every level of society. Thinking back to Speculate Everything, I recalled the topic of dark design that looks at ugly and complex themes that most design ignores, but followed through it can lead to a “frisson that excites and challenges.” It is not about the exploration of darkness for its own sake, but rather to bring positivity out of negativity. For this reason, I’m glad that I’ve “stayed with the trouble”, and look to further explore the related themes of underground, loss, memory, hidden narratives and visibility at our next group meeting.

UPDATE: Again, our meeting had diverging themes about the underground, but they are naturally moving closer together, with other group members also researching death. While I focussed on the physical offline experience, other group members have focussed on the digital experience, traditional monuments and computer-generated poems based on these. This has allowed us to build up a world around the topic, opening up a rich design space for more focussed exploration.

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Feb 2020 visit to the MoMa, full of smart city inspiration.

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VI. The Smart City: The Other Side of the World

Before the smart city project started, I had planned a holiday with family to New York. Although I was excited about the prospect of leaving London to relax, recharge and explore what the big apple had to offer; I had a newfound excitement to look at the city through ‘smart city lenses’. Given that I was on the other side of the world away from my team, this felt like the perfect opportunity to flex my image-making skills as a form of visual research, to generate evidence of and communicate my lived experience (Rose, 2015). This medium of research helps to convey a meaning that would otherwise be missed using text alone. This reminded me of a beautiful TED talk I watched a few years ago about pen pal communication between a London and New York without words. This beautiful project has been documented through a website and a book.

Tuesday: I arrive in New York at 7pm (midnight New York time). Exhausted, but trying to beat jetlag I watch TV and surf the net, planning my week’s activities.

Wednesday: Home to a museum that “fuels creativity, ignites minds and provides inspiration” visiting the Museum of Modern Art was paramount (MoMA). MoMA's exhibitions were vast, spanning 5 floors with installations, video and art. On the4th floor, I was drawn to the New Monuments exhibition that looked at the future of buildings in terms of shape, purpose and material. The conceptual buildings hung, drooped and oozed mimicking their material, the unpredictable effects of the process of creating them, but most interestingly reflected the political climate of the time. The hanging city reflects the warfare of the Vietnam War, feminism, the oozing designs feminism. What would our possible world be made of? What do we want it to reflect? The monuments use materials not only for efficiency, but to add a new layer provocation.

New Monuments Exhibition - Hanging Cities of War

New Monuments Exhibition - Oozing Cities of Feminism

On the 3rd floor, I explored the Taking a Thread for a Walk exhibition - a suspended macrame knot sculpture creating a woven textile exploration, featuring combinations of natural and synthetic fibres. 

Thread installation

On a plaque nearby, its creator was quoted: “just as it is possible to go from any place to any other, so also, starting from a defined and specialized field, can one arrive at a realization of ever-extending relationships … traced back to the event of a thread.” This piece felt so poignant, echoing the literature of Haraway and Ingold using threads and metaphors of cats-cradles to represent the infinite relationships between seemingly unrelated things. 

Thursday: After our group discussions and speculation about the juxtaposition between new and old, abandoned and repurposed spaces and visible vs. hidden, I thought it important to visit one of New York’s most prominent monuments - the 9/11 Memorial Museum.

Outside National September 11th Memorial & Museum

Re-designed World Trade Center Station

9/11 Memorial with freshly laid roses

When I saw these roses, something Chris said last week popped into my mind - tiny monuments. Despite the atrocity that happened here 19 years ago, the names that surround the repurposed space act as a memorial, and each rose I saw a woman place stand as a tiny monument representing loss, hope and simultaneously the pain and beauty of death and renewal. Being in this repurposed space gave me time and space to reflect. Where was I when this happened? I was 11 and just got home from school to see a plane crash onto a tower on the TV. Where was Edward Francis Maloney III? Where are his family now? Without this repurposed space, I may have never known he existed or peeked into his life. As Kidd writes, “Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here.”― Sue Monk Kidd (2001).

Friday: As I moved around the city my eyes couldn’t help but dart between towering skyscrapers. I found myself looking up a lot until I saw steam rise in front of my face. I looked down to see the heat from the subway escaping through a grate. It brought me back to our project. I knew about New York’s famous subways, but what else was down there? It turned out the ‘concrete jungle’ is a city built on water.

A plaque at Two 5th Avenue to remind city dwellers of the waterways that once were

Under Manhattan's streets lie the remnants of one of New York’s 101 lost waterways. Once one of its largest, Minetta Brook used to wind through Lower Manhattan’s farmland before being paved over in the 1820s. For centuries, it was visited by Native Americans for angling due to its abundance of trout. In the 1600s, Dutch settlers arrived along with their slaves, who were eventually emancipated, making the area home to one of New York's first African-American settlements. As the population increased, the large roads surrounding it were renamed to reflect its people. 

However, as Manhattan became more metropolitan, Minetta Brook became an inconvenience to city planners and developers, and in the 1820s, it was physically buried using land from nearby hills, and eventually paved over. Its past was overwritten.

This trip was eye-opening. Although these experiences were outside London, it was beneficial to look to other cities for perspective. It showed me just how intertwined the themes of time, space, nostalgia, memory, loss and monuments really are, and the dangers created when a community has no way to embrace them. A few weeks ago, I was unsure about Dunne and Raby’s cone that referred to a preferable world. I didn’t understand how the decision on what a preferable world was could be made without bias. I now understand that a preferrable world is one that gives its citizens freedom and space to feel, whether the emotion is positive or negative. It adds rather than taking away, bringing us closer to a sentient city.

As always a trip gives you the chance to be open and gain a new perspective, but too much time away opens up thought to the objects, customs, processes and uniqueness of your home that you come to miss. I’ll go back to London jet-lagged, but with new stories to tell. 

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Lapping waves at Wapping’s shoreline. What lies beneath?

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VII. The Smart City: There’s No Place Like Home

“We use our imagination and creativity to bring memories and history back to the future in a different way.” ― Yosuke Hayana

Despite being in New York, the beauty of Slack allowed me to keep in contact with the group regardless of time differences. The team updated me about the group trip to Greenwich to see the Rush and Slices of Time Exhibitions. 

Inspired by this, New York, the previous Silvertown visit, and our pivoted focus on the forgotten history of the Thames, I wanted to pay a visit to my old stomping ground - Wapping for a first-hand experience of the river. Living next to the Thames a few years ago I knew just the right place to cut through, that opened up to the shoreline. 

On the shoreline rests Prospect of Whitby, the UK’s oldest riverside tavern with its original hanging noose. I couldn’t help but look at up and think about the people that had lost the fight against its grip to and the people that came to watch. What did they think that day? How did they feel about it? The juxtaposition of such an ugly thing surrounded by the beauty of the river was slightly eery.

Prospect of Whitby with its original hanging noose

By chance, I spotted someone paying more attention to the river than others. Dressed warmly to protect against the bracing wind with muddy green boots to shield his feet from the lapping tide, the man pulled a spade-like object from his bag before kneeling down to dig. I watched for a while, intrigued. I took the chance and struck up a conversation, only to find out he was a Mudlark! 

A mudlark (Richard), foraging early on Saturday morning

Richard downed tools while we spoke:

“I come here on the weekend, I haven’t been doing this long… maybe 2 months, but it’s pretty cool. It’s a different way to discover the city. I usually find bits of pieces of pottery. I’ve found a few pipes too… The best thing I’ve found is a whole pottery head, and it gets you thinking; how did that get there? What’s the story behind that?!”

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“I had to get a permit to do this, but it only took a month to get. I’m kinda new to the area so I thought it would be a cool way to explore it. A friend told me about it. I work just round the corner, sometimes I come on my lunch break.”

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“I don’t really share my finds with anyone else, it’s something special for me… to remember the day. I don’t think many mudlarks share their finds. I keep mine to myself.”

I asked if he wouldn’t mind telling me about what he’d uncovered today but he declined, showing me just how private mudlarks are. I felt very privileged to get a brief insight into the mudlarking world, especially because they remain so elusive both online and offline. Despite trying to make inroads through joining Facebook communities, our group remained very much on the outside. 

After he left, I hung around for a while watching the tide wash in and out, each time depositing little treasures when the water touched the sand. Inspired, I cleared away some stones and dug. After a few minutes, I’d uncovered two bones, a surprisingly sturdy twig, a coin and a shard of a glass bottle.

Some of my ‘mudlark’ finds from Wapping riverbank by Crane Place passage

I reflected on Richard’s words thinking about my finds and the stories behind them, tiny monuments holding such big stories. On sharing my finds and impromptu conversation with the group, we agreed that although mudlarks are notoriously elusive, this means that the objects and stories they uncover live and die with them. The river is a key monument in the city. Even though it is highly visible, running through the entire city, it holds a rich history that is buried in the depths of the rive, waiting to be discovered. Our preferable world has a responsibility to ensure these stories are available to be heard. 

The finds sparked a great discussion between the group as we thought about how to incorporate these seemingly unimportant objects into our design. On the journey home after our meeting, my mind was racing. Looking at the bones I collected for inspiration and design ideas, I thought about Richard. Although he was finding and collecting objects, they were only seen and felt by him. They were only interpreted by him. They were only kept by him, never to be ‘added’ to history. I realised these tiny monuments are cultural probes in themselves, holding history, culture, knowledge, memory and emotion. What if these object facets could be stretched beyond mudlarks? What would it mean for city dwellers if these objects could talk? 

The following week in our meeting, I proposed this idea to the group. We speculated on how the memory of an object could be distilled into a Mudlark and how that memory could move beyond them. Together we sketched the river, thinking on what surrounds and is a part of it, mud, riverbanks, slime, weeds and reeds. This brought up thoughts from Greenwich and the inverted reeds. How can a reed that is so prominent in the river fit into the narrative? Maybe a mudlark could use the read to draw out the memory? What about a message in a bottle that reveals itself when the river dries up? What if the read or the bottle was only discovered when the tide went in and out? But what do they do with the finds? But how do we protect their privacy? What about a kiosk on the shore, where mudlarks can log their finds? How can they share them? I appreciated the spirit we had in this session because ideas we’re never torn down, instead pivoted and built upon. It felt like the improv method yes and? used by comedians to extend a thought. We had a lot of ideas on the table (literally!) which made me wonder how we might start to document it. I suggested the imagery of the Thames using its length to document the past, present and future in regard to our process, with movement to the possible world showing more clarity with each week. Tania later posted a message on Slack, perfectly representing our thoughts in a sketch, while Chris had on early thoughts on the kiosk functionality:

Tania’s sketch of our potential physical output

Chris’ drawing of a potential physical output presenting an object’s  audio

In Ada Lovelace over three hours, I feel we had our most productive meeting yet. Sadly, due to unforeseen world circumstances, this would be the last meeting we had in person.

(1102 words)

[luwaonline]

Yet to read this book, but the title really resonated with me in terms of our focus on memory, nostalgia, the everyday and the future.