Our journey from the early variety of themes to the final proposal - focussing on the themes of:
Past-present-future, ‘dumb city’, tiny monuments, nostalgia, death and loss, forgotten and fabulated narratives
Challenges we faced:
Complexity of the chosen subject matter
Finding access to the foreshore
Researching the mudlarks
Working remotely in a pandemic
The changing meaning of physical and digital spaces in a pandemic:
Regulation of public space during the pandemic has exceeded anything our group could have imagined
Online platforms have become a live monument to our complex relationship between individualism, consumerism and regulation
Digital death and loss have become a daily occurrence
The deserted, inaccessible Thames is now a symbol of our lost freedom
Who is this project for?
Our project took a meandering route that did not have a specific group of uers in mind
We have placed mudlarks centre-stage, but are also not designing for a modern-day mudlark
Instead, we are speculating on how mudlarks could fit in a possible future
We are not offering solutions and are leaving open-ended strands.
Our main audience is today’s Londoners - we are challenging them to think about our key themes, and to think about ways in which we humanise physical and digital space in order to create meaning.
Read more:
Now that this project is nearing an end, I am stepping back from it for a critical reflection upon our design journey and its destination. We explored a vast array of possible themes, and chose to zoom in on the themes of past-present-future, ‘dumb city’, tiny monuments, nostalgia, death and loss, and forgotten and fabulated narratives. We illustrated the evolution of our creative process, as well as its final results, using physical and digital pieces of work.
Image: From the early variety of themes to the final proposal.
Challenges we faced
The challenges to our creative journey were numerous: embracing and controlling the complexity of the subject matter; finding access to the foreshore; researching the elusive mudlarks; finishing the project remotely in the midst of a pandemic lockdown. The latter was especially tough for us, as our proposal was rooted in physical space. We accepted compromises to ensure that the project was still deliverable, such as abandoning any physical printing, giving up foreshore visits, choosing not to ship across our ‘mudlarking finds’ and instead simply to photoshop them into the image of the final interactive soundboard. We communicated through Slack and held our final meetings on Hangouts and Zoom instead of in person. My own working hours were severely affected by losing access to childcare in lockdown. On Twitter, I joked about needing a new ‘smart city’ invention: an army of remotely operated robot nannies to help self isolating parents cope at home. Perhaps this is for my next project.
Image: My ‘robot nanny’ Tweet
The changing meaning of physical and digital spaces in a pandemic
As I write this, London is in its fourth week of the lockdown. Access to many parks and recreation areas has been prohibited in order to control social distancing, while the PLA has blocked all recreational access to the Thames foreshore. A police helicopter hovers over my local area of East London multiple times per day, on the lookout for illegal social gatherings. The level of regulation of public space in the UK has taken a leap well beyond my group’s wildest fabulations.
In his documentary The Century of the Self, Curtis discusses the rise of individualism and consumerism in the Western world: “Although we feel we are free, in reality, we — like the politicians — have become the slaves of our own desires.” Today’s pandemic feeds on this Western individualism and consumerism, driving many to panic buy essential goods and to ignore social distancing for their own selfish reasons. In parallel, there has been an explosion of spontaneous individual surveillance activities: neighbours spying on neighbours, lone walkers taking pictures of groups in parks, public naming and shaming of panic buyers. Much of this activity is immediately uploaded to social media, which is fast becoming a live monument to our complex relationship between individualism, consumerism and regulation. My group’s regulated mudlarks seem tame by comparison.
Since the lockdown, the Facebook mudlarking community has had a sway of posts urging its members to respect the law by forsaking their visits to the foreshore. A few posters have shared that their friends or relatives have died of COVID-19; these posts have been immediately flooded with an outpour of digital messages of support and love. Undoubtedly the Facebook profiles of the deceased are now full of posts and comments, grieving for them and promising to remember them forever. What I have started researching at the start of the project, has now become a daily occurrence.
All the while the Thames still flows, still is. The river's iconic silhouette, devoid of boats and people, now regularly featured in the drone news footage, serves as a symbol of nostalgia for our lost freedom, our lost access to public space. The humanised Thames has changed to reflect the change in us.
Who is this project for?
Our brief encouraged us to embrace the mindset of “artist-designers”, in the words of Bill Gaver. Our project therefore took a meandering route that did not have a specific group of users in mind, unlike the more conventional HCID projects. We made the mudlarks centre-stage, honouring the bottoms-up ‘dumb city’ rule we had set for ourselves from the get-go. We decided not to be limited to designing for modern-day mudlarks, instead taking a longer view and speculating on how they could fit within a possible future. We were adamant throughout our design process that we were not offering solutions and were happy to leave open-ended strands, embracing the uncertainty of our speculations.
So if not modern-day mudlarks, who is this project for?
For me, our main audience is today’s Londoners. I would like them to be moved and intrigued by this project. To reflect on the taboo subject of death, and to consider what digital death means to them. To contemplate our obsession with nostalgia and the repercussions this can have on our world. To pay attention to the ways in which the Thames and other regulated public spaces fit into our lives and the ways in which we occupy them. To think about how we humanise the physical and digital space around us in order to create meaning. In the words of Jean-Paul Sartre, “Life has no meaning a priori… It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.”
The fusing of historic London (mudlarks) with the technologies of the future
Physicality is important for our group pieces of work
Evolution of the group narrative piece:
Image: Narrative piece summary.
From QR codes to giant poster to folded paper to booklet
The final idea involved a giant booklet with translucent pages, gradually revealing the river silhouette
The final narrative piece:
Designed and created by me - digital only (physical printing not possible due to the pandemic lockdown)
The underlying structure is the map of the Thames, with marked geographic locations: Wapping, Greenwich, Silvertown, North Woolwich Pier
Word shapes are created using Doves font
Juxtapositions and combinations of images and text serve as a form of storytelling
Location signs are inspired by the iconic Thames Path signage
The interactive soundboard:
Image: Interactive soundboard summary.
Designed and created by a fellow group member and me
Early ideas and first prototype reacted to hand touch
Final design uses greycard with cut-out silhouette of the Thames, and spaces for ‘mudlarking finds’
The ‘mudlarking finds’ placed upon the soundboard speak with the voice of the past owner of the object, telling their story
The imaginary ‘mudlarking finds’ of the future:
Each member chose several objects of significance for them, as candidates for the finds
‘Future cultural probes’ - we fabulated that they would be discovered by the mudlarks of the future
They challenge the taboo of talking about death, tying in with the theme of nostalgia, where in the future even the most mundane modern-day objects could become infused with interest and mystery
The written narrative:
Image: Artifacts to accompany the written narrative.
A speculative future in which imaginary commercial or government entities attempt to shape and control the human relationship with memory, digital death, and the river
The distant future’s Ministry of Memory is hunting for a ‘sunny glow of yesteryear’ in the form of historic mudlarking finds, to sate its population’s craving for packaged nostalgia
The mudlarking craft of the distant future is heavily regulated by the government, reflecting the modern-day trend for increasing regulation
The mudlarking finds are from our own corporate near future, placed there by Mori-Industries - a tongue-in-cheek representation of our current corporate and consumerist reality, and a reflection of the very human desire to be remembered after one’s death.
Supplementary output - the video:
Created by a fellow group member for our final crit, the video is a documentary inspired by Adam Curtis and old footage of East Woolwich and Silvertown.
It uses old archive footage to avoid a polished feel of stereotypical smart city videos, and has a dreamy nostalgic quality to reflect the themes in our project.
Read more:
By this point, our group gathered enough information to start finalising our collective proposal. We felt that due to the physicality of our project we should create some physical objects as part of our submission. At the forefront of our minds were the motifs of memory and death, ‘dumb’ small scale physicality in contrast with the polished smart cities or monumental interventions, the flow of time, forgotten and fabulated narratives. My earlier musings on the re-imagined ‘task-artifact cycle’ (post 03) led us to blend the historic London - the mudlarks - with the technologies of the future.
Gradually, we settled on producing two primary pieces of group work: a narrative piece explaining the progression of our research and ideas, and an interactive digital device (interactive soundboard). These would be accompanied by a written narrative that would pull them into a coherent whole.
The narrative piece
Evolution of the narrative piece:
Image: Evolution of early ideas about the format and presentation of the narrative piece. Numbers are referred to in the text below.
Our early ideas included everything from dramatic performances to QR codes scattered around city locations (1). With the emerging focus on the Thames, I was keen to use the iconic river silhouette as part of the imagery. My initial idea was a giant poster of the Thames with zoom-in sections for specific locations (2). One of our group was keen to incorporate a ‘hidden’ quality to the piece, so we experimented with various ways of folding the paper (3, 4). Another of our group introduced the idea of a booklet - a series of large translucent pages which would initially show a jumbled up overlay of many images detailing our design progression, but would gradually become clearer and clearer as the viewer would flip through the pages, until finally ‘The Proposal’ would be revealed (5). We settled on this idea, thinking that we could print the pages on A1 translucent paper, to form a booklet with a solid cardboard backing (7, 8). Unfortunately, due to the pandemic physical printing was no longer possible, so we settled on a digital version of the booklet instead.
Final narrative piece:
Image: a snapshot of the final narrative piece.
I volunteered to build the booklet using Photoshop and Indesign. These are the visual techniques and sources of inspiration I have used, while regularly communicating with my group for feedback:
The underlying structure of the booklet is the geographical map of the Thames.
Using word shapes to convey meaning and create art. This was inspired by the work of Paul Soulellis and of the Russian poet Mayakovsky and the Constructivists.
Image: examples of word shapes by Soulellis and Mayakovsky
Using the Doves font to invoke the spirit of mudlarking and to reflect on the Thames’ rich history. The beautiful, filigree font is perfect for creating word shapes. The way it is laid out on some pages invokes the Doves type being scattered down the river.
Creating a visual structure and content with juxtapositions and combinations of images and text, to convey our group’s story to the viewer. The pages start off as a jumble of overlaid images and text, and gradually become more ordered to reflect the narrative of confusion giving place to order as our group thinking progresses. The silhouette of the Thames starts off being barely visible, and is revealed through the progression of the booklet.
Four geographic locations are highlighted on the map: these are the real places where access to the foreshore is possible, and/or where we have visited in person. The locations are poetically and visually associated with the design stages of our project:
Location 1: Wapping - Brainstorming and the Underground
The visual style of the location signs mimics the iconic Thames Path signage
The interactive soundboard
Evolution of the interactive soundboard:
Image: Evolution of early ideas about the format and presentation of the interactive soundboard. Numbers are referred to in the text below.
This piece of work was spearheaded by one member of my group. He designed and built the first prototype that reacted to hand touch, producing a sound as it did so (1, 2). During a pub session, he drew a quick doodle in my sketchbook (3) and this became the basis for the final design (4). It includes a cut-out silhouette of the Thames, as well as several cut-out spaces that correspond to map locations.
Once a physical object - a ‘mudlarking find’ - is put upon one of these spaces, it interacts with the conductive paint and produces the sound of human voice, telling the story of the object and its previous owner. The interactive soundboard allows the user to feel like a mudlark who has found the object and is able to listen to the memories attached to it.
My role in the production of the piece was sourcing the modelling materials, setting up the A1 pieces of card, cutting out the shape of the Thames and the spaces for the ‘mudlarking finds’, and painting the piece. I then sent it off to the fellow group member who assembled the final electronics and filmed the piece in action.
Image: my work-in-progress interactive soundboard, and a work-in-progress picture taken by my fellow group member
Image: a snapshot from the video of the interactive soundboard in action
The imaginary ‘mudlarking finds’ of the future:
Each member of our group selected two or three objects to be the candidates for the ‘mudlarking finds’ to be used in the interactive soundboard. These are documented below:
Image: our group’s imaginary ‘mudlarking finds’
The objects each of us chose were meaningful to us personally, and were a mixture of historic objects (such as the real mudlarking finds from our trips to the Thames) and modern ones. For example, I chose my son’s toy Lego car as one of mine. We were imagining that these objects would be deposited in the river in the near future and would be found by the mudlarks of the distant future, becoming future cultural probes. We broadly wanted to stay true to the spirit of mudlarking - not making the objects too easy to find or to interpret, instead allowing the mudlarks to enjoy their craft of finding and researching. However, in our future world view, the amount of regulation of this activity will increase - in line with the current trend - and therefore the mudlarks will operate under a governmental framework rather than as individuals.
Our ‘mudlarking finds’ attempt to subvert the taboo of talking about death as they will tell the story of their long-deceased owners. This ties in with the themes from my digital death study in post 05. They play on the idea of nostalgia, where in the future even the most mundane objects such as a Lego car from 2020, could become infused with interest and mystery. In the words of Milan Kundera, “In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.” The mudlarking treasures become tiny monuments to individuals - small scale, personal, ‘dumb.’
Image: My Photoshop of the finished interactive soundboard to include the groups ‘mudlarking finds.’
The written narrative
This accompanies the primary pieces of work and describes a speculative future in which imaginary commercial or government entities attempt to shape and control the human relationship with memory, digital death, and with the river itself. The distant future is framed within increased regulation, in which even the free craft of mudlarking is heavily dominated by the government, and the mudlarks are employed and trained by the so-called Ministry of Memory to track valuable finds. The Ministry of Memory is hunting for a ‘sunny glow of yesteryear’ in an attempt to sate its population’s craving for packaged nostalgia. Their ‘yesteryear’ is, in turn, defined as our own near future, populated by enterprises such as the Mori-Industries - a tongue-in cheek representation of our current corporate and consumerist reality, and a reflection of the very human desire to be remembered after one’s death. It is Mori-Industries that place the ordinary citizens’ ‘mudlarking finds’ in the river for the future entities to discover.
Image: A diagram of future inter-relationships, a Mori-Industries calling card and a Ministry of Memory form that the future mudlarks must fill in to document their finds (created by my fellow group members).
One member of our group has created the story and named the key players in it, and we have all contributed to editing it. The illustrating artifacts were created by two of my fellow group members.
Supplementary output: the video
A fellow member of our group has produced a video which was presented at our final crit.
Image: A still from our group’s final crit video
The video has served as an intermediate point of reflection on our progress. It has been made in a documentary format inspired by Adam Curtis, the music videos of Bill Wurtz and old footage of Silvertown and Woolwich, among others.
The documentary is the most suitable format for the video because it allows for an information-packed voiceover accompanied by images depicting our design journey. This is intermingled with archive footage, giving it a distinct Adam Curtis-like feel. Whereas, in the words of Gillian Rose, documentaries about smart cities tend to depict “a future which seems to have no past but also no sense of its own time passing, since nothing in [their] urban environments seems to have aged,” this video swings in the opposite direction by using old archive footage even of modern digital technologies, thus reinforcing the idea of a ‘dumb city’ that our group has embraced. The video has a dreamy, nostalgic quality, linking it with the themes of nostalgia, the past, memory and death.
Access to the Thames foreshore as an act of spatial occupation:
The Thames foreshore is not easily accessible due to tide, regulation and lack of access locations
There are grassroots attempts to reclaim the Thames for the general public, but so far they have not been successful
Being on the foreshore is a way of subverting public space
Mudlarks - regulated rebels:
Mudlarks access the foreshore regularly, unlike ordinary citizens
It is a historic activity that has evolved over the centuries
The mudlark’s paradox: an act of spatial occupation that has become regulated by an official body
Getting under a mudlark’s skin:
What our group did: joining Facebook communities, contacting museums, contacting individual mudlarks, desktop research
Conclusions: mudlarks are elusive, they view their hobby as a craft to be honed, they are protective of their preferred locations and sometimes of their finds, too.
My possible cultural probe for a modern-day mudlark:
Included: postcards, camera, video camera, diary or blog
Not included: maps (mudlarks do not share locations)
The Doves font:
The Doves font type was thrown into the Thames by its creator in 1916-17 and rescued from the river in 2015 by a team of divers led by a mudlark
My group is using its digitised version in our work
The humanised river:
The relationship between individuals and the river is a sort of ‘dumb’ approach to the smart city
Mudlarks humanise the river through uncovering lost stories and creating fabulated stories of the objects that are found in the river
The river is a medium for the physical and the digital to intermingle within the framework of death and loss
The past, present and future journeys of remembrance from my 'digital death' interviews (see post 05) have fed into our group’s project title: ‘You’ll Miss Me When I’m Gone.’ I have created the title logo using the digital Doves font and images of the physical Doves type pieces rescued from the river.
Read more:
Access to the Thames foreshore as an act of spatial occupation
The Thames is a tidal river. Its foreshore goes through daily cycles of being fully submerged to being partially exposed. While the tide makes going to the foreshore potentially dangerous, it isn’t the primary reason why access to it is limited – private land ownership of the river’s banks and the management of the river are also to blame. The Port of London Authority (PLA) merely ‘tolerates’ public access. Nevertheless, it is possible to get close to the foreshore safely by consulting the tide tables and by knowing the limited number of places where it is accessible.
Image: A document listing all the places where the Thames is still accessible; a page from the tidal tables published by the PLA
Ordinary members of the public rarely visit the foreshore because of the lack of obvious access and the effects of PLA’s policy. While there are many campaigns and proposals to reclaim the Thames, it is not looking likely that the PLA will embrace them any time soon; all the while the increasing density of private developments along the banks makes it harder and harder to do so as time goes by.
Our team has been able to go down to the foreshore on two occasions, in North Woolwich and in Wapping (my own visit is documented in post 06 of this blog). I recall that standing on the deserted foreshore felt rebellious. In the spirit of Sara Heitlinger’s talk on subverting public space at the March teachout, my presence on the foreshore was an act of spatial occupation, albeit a modest one.
Shortly thereafter, London shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and further visits to the foreshore became impossible for us.
Mudlarks: regulated rebels
Unlike ordinary citizens, mudlarks access the foreshore regularly. Through doing so, they are reclaiming the ‘lost’ river by defying conventions. Mudlarks have come up in this blog a few times, and are fast becoming a focus in our group’s thinking. They scavenge in the river mud for items of value or historic interest, and have a rich history in London, coming into prominence in the 18th century, and experiencing a revival in recent years. The context and the reasons within which they operate have evolved over the centuries. The original mudlarks scavenged as a source of income, and were often children. Today’s mudlarks are mostly middle-class adults who engage in it as a hobby, while their interest is archaeological and personal rather than monetary.
Image: A page on historic mudlarks from Peter Ackroyd’s London Under; a modern-day photograph of mudlarking finds
The level of regulation of this activity has evolved, too - previously unregulated, today it requires an expensive license issued by the PLA, whereas items of high value must be handed over to the authorities, else the finder would be breaking the law. There is a paradox in this situation - an act of spatial occupation that is regulated by an official body.
Getting under a mudlark’s skin
To learn about the mudlarks, we have tried several approaches: joining online communities on Facebook, contacting the London Docklands Museum, contacting individual mudlarks, as well as studying books and online resources. Obtaining direct contact proved tricky; our desktop research pointed at the fact that mudlarks tend to be elusive. Nevertheless, one member of our group was able to talk to one in person, and another managed to communicate with one briefly via a mutual friend. Even despite this limited research, we were able to gather some insights. One important insight was that mudlarks viewed their hobby as a craft to be honed and to be proud of. They kept their favourite locations secret, and did their own research into their finds. Some kept their finds to themselves, whereas others chose to post pictures and videos - the Facebook mudlarking group had daily posts, mostly to ask for information about their finds, but also to boast about them.
The classroom session 4 and the article by Bill Gaver on cultural probes provoked a group discussion whether devising a cultural probe for the mudlarks would be plausible. We decided against it due to the time constraints and due to the fact that we could not easily get access to them.
Yet, I mused about devising a hypothetical cultural probe, based on our research into the mudlarks so far. What would work in such a probe pack and what would not?
Maps - no. The mudlarks are specifically against revealing their favourite foreshore locations
Postcards - possibly. Gaver states that “postcards are an attractive medium... because of their connotations as an informal, friendly mode of communication.”
Photographs - yes. Many mudlarks love sharing photos of their finds online.
Videos - maybe. Some mudlarks put videos of their finds on Youtube.
Diaries - yes. Many mudlarks like to document their finds.
Blogs - maybe. Some mudlarks already keep them.
Image: My hypothetical cultural probe for a modern-day mudlark.
Meanwhile our group discussed how throwing an object into the Thames for a future mudlark to find could be seen as a sort of cultural probe. As the mudlarks in the distant future discover these objects, the ways they choose to treat and document them could be the subject of a study by a future sociologist or designer.
The Doves font
Lara Maiklem’s book Mudlarking includes the incredible story of the Doves font. The font type was thrown into the Thames by its creator in 1916-17, and small portions of it were rescued by a team of PLA divers led by a mudlark in 2015. Maiklem met the font rescuer on the Facebook mudlarking group, and was later able to uncover several type pieces herself and use them as part of her book cover. The font now exists as a digital version, which I was able to track and buy for our group use.
Image: Doves font
The humanised river
The relationship between individuals and the river is small-scale and bottom-up, a sort of ‘dumb’ approach to the smart city - in contrast with the top-down, giant engineering scale of Silvertown’s High Line (post 04) or with the sanitised, smart cities of the Gillian Rose critique.
The river itself, as a physical and geographical entity, simply exists - it is, was and will be - without any feelings or memories of its own. It is us humans who inject all these themes into the river, humanising it to make it meaningful to us. Through the gradual progress of my group’s thinking, we are now close to defining what we want our own meaning to be.
Mudlarks humanise the river in their own unique way. They are finders of the lost stories of the Thames, generators of fabulated stories (as per Maiklem’s book in post 06) and a link between the river’s past and present. For us, they are also a link to the Thames’ future.
The river is a medium within which the physical and the digital can intermingle within the framework of death and loss, pulling in the themes I have previously researched (post 05). The key elements of this narrative are the powerful physical presence of the river, the objects and stories that it embraces, swallows and releases, the digital tools of the future mudlarks (akin to the metal detectors that some use today). The timeline of loss and grief uncovered in my digital interviews - the past, present and future journeys of remembrance - has fed into the project title proposed by one of our group: ‘You’ll Miss Me When I’m Gone.’
Image: A logo I have created of our project title, ‘You’ll Miss Me When I’m Gone’, using a combination of the digital Doves font and images of the Doves type pieces rescued from the Thames.
The Thames has the potential to unite our group's ideas:
The metaphorical ‘underground’ space of memory and lost stories
The low-brow ‘anti-High Line’
Mudlarks - those who search the Thames for lost memories
The river could tell digital stories about the deceased
Trip to Greenwich:
Exhibition: Rush by LYN Atelier - the reeds, panorama of the river, gentle sounds
Exhibition: Slices of Time by Emmanuelle Moureaux - a timeline starting in the past and continuing into the future, where visitors can leave their real or imagined memories on paper circles
Docklands Museum: the forgotten narrative of those affected by the slave trade
Trip to North Woolwich Pier:
My takeaways from Lara Maiklem’s book Mudlarking:
The ritual throwing of objects into the river to help one forget - dealing with grief in physical ways
Mudlarking as a way to control one’s demons - the river is a portal to a past world
My installation on the North Wollwich foreshore:
Imagined stories: filling in the missing details about mudlarking finds
An artifact commemorating the death of a public figure, thrown into the river as a ritual
Intermingling of physical and digital - a ‘dumb’ small-scale approach to engaging with the Thames
A reflection on the past, the present and imagined future timeline
Read more:
The Thames as our focus
It felt to me that we ought to cast our nets wider than just Silvertown, to reflect the vast scale of a smart city. I dropped a line to our Slack channel, suggesting changing our focus to the Thames at large. I threw in a few ideas: the silt as a smart city entity; a low-brow ‘anti-High Line’ across the Thames; the river as a metaphorical underground space of memory and lost stories; the mudlarks whom I had been thinking of during my Silvertown walk.
The following week, our group undertook a field trip to Greenwich, and a few days later, to North Woolwich Pier – one of the few places in East London where access to the Thames foreshore is still possible.
Greenwich
In Greenwich, we visited two small exhibitions: Rush by LYN Atelier, and Slices of Time by Emmanuelle Moureaux.
Rush juxtaposed the verticality of its reeds with the panoramic view of the Thames visible through the gallery windows, and the gentle sounds generated by the gallery visitors invoked the sounds of the Thames.
Slices of Time was a thought-provoking and beautiful exhibit, but what intrigued us the most was its visitor participation section: a timeline stretched horizontally across the gallery windows, starting in the beginning of the 20th century, and finishing fifty years from today. Visitors could write their memories or predictions – real or imagined – on paper circles, and stick the circles to the windows next to the relevant year. This installation generated a lively discussion within our group, shaping our thoughts on how our own project timeline should be presented.
Our Greenwich trip continued on the Emirates High Line, taking us across the river to the Docklands Museum. At the museum, we explored an exhibition on the British slave trade and its impact on London and the world at large. The exhibition was sensitive, thoughtful, eager to convey the monumental scale of the damage that the practices of the British slave trade had inflicted upo the world, and how they had shaped London. The exhibition focussed on the forgotten narratives of those affected by the slave trade.
As we were walking around the exhibition, one of my group’s members pointed at a picture of sugar cane reed – one of the staples of London’s slave trade. “This, to me, looks similar to the reeds we saw earlier on the Thames. Isn’t it weird? There could be a link here to London’s terrible past, represented by this reed.”
Image: Reeds on the Thames; an exhibit dedicated to sugar cane reed in the Docklands Museum
North Woolwich
Our group’s field trip to the North Woolwich Pier was instigated by me, as I was keen to get physically down to the Thames foreshore. Before the trip, I had been reading the book Mudlarking by Lara Maiklem. There were some parts in the book where I saw a direct link to my digital graveyards study – for example, in how people today choose to deal with grief in physical ways:
“Some people commit their troubles to the river in a more tangible way by physically throwing them in and letting the water take them away… There is a good chance the owners of these objects are still alive and that they threw them into the river in the belief that the water would swallow their problems up and make them disappear for ever.“ (Maiklem, 2019)
But the paragraph that struck me as the most powerful was this one:
“There are others who come to the river in search of peace, and to keep themselves together. For some, their visits are a way to control their demons, to deal with what’s going on in their lives or with what’s happened in their past. For them, the foreshore is an anonymous world without judgment or demands, purpose or destination, inhabited only by the ghosts of people who no longer exist. My friend Johnny likes his trips to the foreshore to entering a portal to another world.”
This is it! I have found a justification for the links I have been trying to make between the river, time, and the experience of loss.
Image: The river at North Woolwich
Maiklem’s book was also peppered with imagined stories - the many instances where she would find an intriguing object, uncover some incomplete information about it, and then imagine the rest, filling in the missing details based on her knowledge of London’s history. She never claimed these stories to be true, but they gave her writing a particular and pleasing richness.
With this in mind, I devised a little art installation for North Woolwich. My aim was to explore my own personal memory that was linked to something that one of my interviewees for digital graveyards had said, and to devise a mini-artifact for it, to be thrown into the river.
My artifact was commemorating the death of David Bowie. I had been an avid Bowie fan for years, and after he had died in 2016, I immersed myself in the public declarations of grief, both on- and offline, visiting his Brixton memorial, singing his songs, posting photos of the newspapers pasted with the faces of Bowie on my Facebook feed. The pictures I put on Facebook had an incredible number of comments and likes – so much so that they keep coming up as my Facebook ‘memories’ every year since then. The added strangeness is that when I hover over his face on my screen, Facebook’s facial recognition mechanism suggests to input a name – as if I could claim to know Bowie in person, or claim that he is in fact still alive.
Image: A quote by my interviewee about the death of David Bowie, a picture of Duncan Jones’ Twitter feed, and my Facebook picture of the newspaper headlines the day after Bowie died.
Image: My artifact commemorating the death of David Bowie, lying on the North Woolwich foreshore
My installation included a quote by my interviewee written by hand on the back of an old photograph, a printout of Duncan Jones’ Twitter feed announcing his father’s death, and a printed picture of one of the Bowie-themed pictures from my Facebook. It encapsulated a few themes from our Creativity project over the past few weeks:
An intermingling of the physical and the digital - a ‘dumb’ small scale approach to engaging with the Thames: a mix of printed social media material, handwriting and an old printed photograph,
The ritual throwing of the object into the Thames, to cleanse myself of the memory it represents, but also, to retain it.
A reflection on the past, present and future timeline of someone’s death: as I threw my artifact into the water, I imagined that a mudlark at some point in the near future might stumble across it, perhaps picking it up to read it, and discarding it because it is not the ancient treasure that they have been looking for.
Seven interviews online and in person, with interview structure kept as loose as possible
Uncovered themes: what the phrase ‘digital graveyards’ meant to the interviewees; the intermingling of the physical and the digital
Small-scale study on expressions of grief online:
Uncovered theme: the past, present and future journeys of remembrance
Designing for memory - Richard Banks and Cambridge Microsoft Research:
Why do people keep objects and photographs?
Defining the self, connecting with the past, honouring those we care about, forgetting
Read more:
Digital graveyards
In parallel with my exploration of Silvertown, I have been conducting interviews about digital graveyards – the experience of death and loss via digital means – one of the subjects that had been discussed in my Creativity group in the earlier weeks. Within an hour of putting a feeler on Facebook asking for volunteers, I was inundated with responses – it seemed this topic struck a chord with many people.
I interviewed seven participants online and in person. As I wasn’t entirely sure at this point what direction the project would take, I kept my interview structure as loose as possible and let my participants choose their own narrative. I then did an analysis of the interviews using Miro affinity sort, where in the process of creating and moving the little post-it notes on the screen, I noticed two strong themes: every interviewee talked about what ‘digital graveyards’ meant to them, and about how they personally made sense of physical death and loss with the help or hindrance of social media.
Based on this, here are my two groupings of the interview results:
Image: An analysis of my digital interviews.
Image: An analysis of my digital interviews.
The second theme - the intermingling of the physical and the digital - especially intrigued me because it was entirely unanticipated and emerged spontaneously during the interviews. For example, one interviewee talked about crashing a funeral of a friend after learning of their death on social media, because to them, expressing grief online did not seem enough, whereas the physical act of being there felt appropriate. As another example, some people chose to create digital artifacts to commemorate the deceased.
Alongside the interviews, I carried out a small-scale study of the emotional language commonly used by people when expressing grief on social media. The results are in the Miro affinity sort below:
Image: An analysis of my digital grief study.
This little study revealed that grieving people express themselves in three distinct ways: by talking about their grief directly, by describing the deceased person in lovely and beautiful ways, and – intriguingly of all – by describing their feelings for that person through mapping their own past, present and future journey of remembrance, as a sort of personal ritual of grievance and acceptance.
Designing for memory
In our classroom session 4, Richard Banks from Cambridge Microsoft Research gave us a talk about his team’s approach to creativity in design. One of the projects he talked about was about memory and how to design for it, in the context of keeping household objects and photographs.
Microsoft’s Insight Magazine’s issue on memory describes how the researchers uncovered the reasons why people kept objects and photographs. Some of these reasons included defining the self, connecting with the past, honouring those we care about, and forgetting. There was a link here with my research on digital graveyards, and with our group’s earlier ponderings on the Thames and Silvertown.
Exploring the richness of Silvertown’s industrial past and the fragmented nature of its present-day make-up
Exploring the potential for our smart city proposal for this area
Reflecting on how London forgets its past: my quest to find the memorial to the Silvertown’s industrial explosion of 1917
The physical presence of the river at low tide
Juxtaposition of the messy and small-scale with the clean, new and large (the High Line)
Urban ecology of the site
Image-making of Silvertown:
Describing the ‘ineffable’ in different ways
An imagined memorial to the victims of the Silvertown explosion in someone’s living room
A map of my walk through Silvertown - conveying the sensory experience and feel of the walk
Way forward / a postcard for Silvertown:
The river’s layers
An ‘anti-High Line’ - a small scale, ‘dumb’ approach
Death and the forgotten story of the explosion
The river retains memories of past events
Read more:
Our classroom session for week 3 was about image-making in design and research. It was an insightful session, with many inspiring themes such as a talk by Anab Jain of Superflux describing how to construct possible futures using the medium of images and physical installations. Anab talked about image as a craft and about how ideas are generated through the process of making them, stressing that image-making is by its nature political.
At the same time, I developed an interest in East London’s Silvertown after a conversation with a member of my Creativity group. We both saw potential in this area of London, with the richness of its industrial past and the fragmented nature of its present-day makeup, into which our smart city could perhaps slot in.
I decided to pay Silvertown a visit, armed with fresh ideas about image-making from our classroom session. My aim was to get a feel of the area and to document my chosen path through it in a series of photographs. When I arrived at West Silvertown DLR, I did not have a predetermined plan, but knew that I wanted to find one particular landmark – a memorial to Silvertown’s industrial explosion of 1917 – in which 50 tons of TNT in a wartime munitions factory blew up, killing 73 people, injuring 400, and laying waste to the entire area.
I assumed that the memorial would be standing at the original location of the old munitions factory. Upon arrival, I discovered a brand new Royal Wharf residential quarter built right on top of where I believed the location of the memorial should have been. There was no sight of the memorial anywhere. Circling around the quarter, I eventually stumbled across a little park with a view of the river. There it was - the memorial! Yet the surrounding context did not match the historic pictures I had seen online, so I concluded that the memorial must have been moved from its original location. Most likely, one of these nice new residential buildings now stood directly on top of where the explosion had happened.
Image: The relocated memorial against the backdrop of the new Royal Wharf Development
The juxtaposition of the small memorial stone with the crisp lines of the 14-story building in the background, to me, exemplified so much of this part of the city, and indeed of London as a whole. London ebbs and flows and in the act of ebbing and flowing it forgets its past, although sometimes – as in this case – there are feeble attempts to maintain its past’s chosen snippets. I wondered how many current residents even noticed this small stone, and knew and cared about what it represented? I imagined that the estate agent whom I saw on a balcony showing around a young Asian family, was unlikely to tell them that they were about to buy a flat built on the former site of London’s largest and deadliest explosion.
I walked on, having documented my thoughts in a series of photographs. I then chose to take a walk to the Thames Barrier, stopping by the river to admire the glistening silt at low tide.
Image: Thames Barrier Park with the river at low tide
Just east of the Barrier, the giant mass of the still active Tate & Lyle refinery loomed, with a ship parked beside it, busy loading goods. Its bustling activity contrasted starkly with the abandoned Tate&Lyle building I had seen earlier by West Silvertown DLR, which had fences all around it and was covered in signs by a construction company, no doubt ready to be converted into flats.
Image: The Tate&Lyle abandoned factory (left) and their working factory visible in the distance (right)
Walking back west, I shot past the West Silvertown DLR to pay a brief visit to the old Tetley Building, previously a brewery, now used as artists’ studios. The site surrounding the building felt rough around the edges, disparate, patchworky. Numerous odd, small businesses nestled in the space under the adjacent motorway – undoubtedly rent here must be cheap by London’s standards!
Image: One of the businesses below the motorway adjacent to the Tetley Building
The giant silhouette of the Emirates High Line dominated the area, looming overhead, strangely out of place and alien. The elevated DLR line spoke a similar language of enormous scale and engineering achievement, in contrast with the tiny, messy human activity below it. In between all this, at ground level, patches of urban landscape were creeping into every crevice and every available space they could find.
Image: Abandoned urban landscape occupying the inaccessible space surrounding one of the giant pillars of the High Line
Image: View of the High Line from inside the Tetley building
“What about urban ecology?” I wondered. I knew that Silvertown was haven for black redstarts, the endangered British birds who prefer to live on urban brownfield sites. While there are protective measures in place for the preservation of black redstarts in London, they inevitably get driven out by new developments such as the Royal Wharf. There were probably many other species of urban animal here, too. And of course, some plant species especially favour sites likes these. During my walk, I spotted a number of buddleia bushes, famous for their ability to grow in derelict urban spaces.
A few days later, while sorting through the photos I had taken, I had a vision come into my head of the young Asian family whom I had seen on the balcony earlier, moving into their new flat at Royal Wharf, unpacking their boxes and enjoying a view of the Thames through the full height windows of their living room. But all the while, a parallel reality unfolded all around them. In my vision, the memorial was not a small stone but a collection of giant rays of powerful light – one for each person who had died – somehow shooting from the ground right through the new building, through the floor of the living room, and up into the sky. Simultaneously, urban nature was allowed to unfold here, unhindered by the new architecture that had been built on top of it. There were black redstarts flying around the living room; hedgehogs were hiding under the sofa; insects were crawling all over the kitchen floor. Yet the young family moved through this apparition, entirely unaware of it. If they knew, would they do anything differently? Or would they remain unperturbed and just go about their usual business?
Image: My Photoshop of an imagined memorial to the victims of the Silvertown Explosion of 2017, as seen inside a living room at Royal Wharf.
Image: A map I’ve put together showing the location of the photographs I had taken during my walk.
The two images above are my alternative ways of telling the story of Silvertown. Both are attempting to describe the ‘ineffable’ - as suggested by Gillian Rose in her article, Visual research methods in an expanded field: what next for visual research methods? - but are doing so in different ways. The map image is my attempt to convey “the sensory experience and feel of urban environments” (Rose, 2015), whereas the image of the Royal Wharf living room is that of an imagined alternative reality.
While working on these two images, I became increasingly convinced that our project should be rooted in a particular physical place, where it could contribute directly to the uncovering of the lost stories of London. I dropped a line on Slack to our group, “I’m sold - I think we should do our project here. But is there enough ‘undergroudness’ in it?”
A fellow group member responded, “The Thames has a lot of layers, you can say that the “undergroundness” is related to that.”
I dug out a photo of the river silt at low tide that I had taken earlier. “What does the Thames remember of the explosion?” I wondered, “Is it possible that some of the pieces of the factory might still be sitting down there, buried in the silt?” I thought of mudlarks who might have come across the debris of the accident, but might have chucked them back into the river, unaware of their significance.
I grabbed a postcard that I had picked up at the Tetley Building’s cafe, and quickly drew a diagram on the back it, trying to synthesize my thoughts. “Something about the river’s layers… The High Line is so weirdly out of scale with its surroundings. What if our project is a sort of ‘anti-High Line’ - low-brow and small, but spanning across the river somehow? The red splurge represents death and the forgotten story of the Silvertown explosion, and how the Thames may have retained it as a memory. Something about urban wildlife here too, maybe?” I still had no idea what the actual smart city proposal would be, but this felt like a step in the right direction.
London's lost rivers - my previous study of the lost river Moselle
The interdependence of the designer and their subject:
Traditional HCI approach tries to eliminate designer bias
Is it possible to embrace it instead? What is to be gained by doing so?
The 'task-artifact cycle': we are changed by the technology as much as it is changed by us
How can the new layer of smart city technology slot into the existing historic context of London?
Critical fabulations:
“What histories of practice have been suppressed or elided? What voices are missing?”
William Blake exhibition:
The themes of underworld and death
The absent narrative of Blake’s wife, Catherine
Read more:
Since my previous post, my group and I have met twice, ideating on the subject to choose for our collective smart cities project. The first session featured an enormous stack of books and an equally enormous variety of potential subjects: power dynamics, nature and the city, urban animals were just some of the overarching themes we discussed. Even though our smart city could be located anywhere, we were fast zooming in on London, not just due to its familiarity and easy access, but also because London offered us incredible opportunities in terms of its complexity and contextual richness.
Image: A photograph of the books our group discussed at our first ideation session
The subjects that I found the most appealing involved abandoned and hidden spaces, especially ones with darker undertones. True to the spirit of my first blog post, I talked with passion about London’s underground graveyards and about the fact that here in this city, you never quite know what’s under your feet. The image below shows a snippet of our group Miro board showing the theme of time - where plague pits, memory and death have all found their home.
Image: A snippet of our group Miro board
Another prominent theme was space, our group’s chosen umbrella term for an array of possibilities from regulated skies to underground rivers. The latter are a special interest of mine - I have done a project on north London’s lost river Moselle some years ago. While doing research on it back in the day, I discovered that Moselle used to flow directly underneath the street I lived on at the time, in Crouch End. I remember wondering how my neighbours would have felt if they knew this - would they be in awe? excited? horrified? concerned that the old lost river could somehow devalue the price of their expensive Edwardian homes?..
Image: My old poster describing the lost river Moselle in north London and its existing and possible relationships with public spaces and Tube stations. (The original article with a higher resolution image is available here)
Image: London Under, the brilliant book by Peter Ackroyd, with a large section on London’s lost rivers
In the classroom session that followed, we were urged to recognise that who we are and how we relate to the world depends on what tools we have available, both as users of technology and as designers. Of course, the bias of the researcher, observer and designer is something that traditional HCI is acutely aware of, and often tries to eliminate. Yet, to what extent is it really possible? What if, instead of pretending to be unbiased, the designer dives right in and accepts bias as part of their creative process? As designers, my group is already prejudicing certain choices over others, and my personal experience and interests are already shaping our creative direction. Further, as users of technology, we could expand on the HCI concept of the task-artefact cycle to claim that we are changed by the technology as much as the technology is changed by us. In the context of my earlier thoughts on the multi-layered smart city, this interdependent relationship could be key in how the new layer of smart city technology will slot into the existing historic context of London, with its already existing interdependencies, both overt and hidden.
During the same session, we were considering the role of stories in design. Rather than being stories that are fabricated by the designer (as illustrated by the ivory tower examples from my second blog post), they are instead uncovered through letting in those, whom the design is for. To allow for this letting in to happen, it may be necessary to shake off the traditional user-centred design approach favoured in HCID which, in the words of Daniela Rosner in her book Critical Fabulations, focusses on “individualism, objectivism, solutionism and universalism.” Instead, Rosner offers an alternative approach of “alliances, recuperations, interferences and extensions.” The concept of recuperations in particular stresses the importance of absent narratives: “What histories of practice have been suppressed or elided?” Whose voices are missing? This slotted in with my earlier ponderings on the lost histories that lie under our feet.
The following weekend I attended the William Blake exhibition at Tate Britain. His work, infused with the powerful motifs of underworld and death, deeply moved me and further reinforced my focus on these themes for our project. Blake had lived his entire life in London and had rarely left its bounds, his work ingrained in the context of the eighteenth and nineteenth century London.
Image: Illustration from the book Complaint, and the consolation, or, night thoughts, 1797, by William Blake. Open at pp.54-5
A very obvious absent narrative haunted me throughout the exhibition - that of Blake’s wife, Catherine. There was a drawing of her at the beginning of the exhibition, alongside a brief piece of text explaining her involvement in Blake’s work, such as engraving, colouring and practical support.
Image: Catherine Blake, c.1805, by William Blake
Another, much more poignant piece of text later on in the exhibition, explained that Blake’s Pilgrim’s Progress was purposefully ignored by scholars for many years because it was known that Catherine had been directly involved in producing the series, and that “her creative and practical influence is only beginning to be fully appreciated.” Catherine’s story resonated with me deeply, making me wonder how much of her absence could be reconstructed at this point in time. Could today’s scholars read between the lines and re-imagine her, in the full depth she deserves, using today’s technology?
The image below is a brief attempt to encapsulate my frame of mind and my preoccupations over that week, in a data visualisation format. I counted the number of times the themes of underworld and death have come up in my personal life over the course of the previous seven days, and then plotted them on a graph, turned upside down to reinforce the effect of its ‘underworld-ness’. Initially spurred by our group discussions, the frequency of these themes ebbed and flowed, taking a ‘deepwater dive’ - 14 mentions of underworld, 14 mentions of death - on the day of the William Blake exhibition.
Image: My data visualisation of my previous week’s preoccupations, illustrating the number of times per day I documented the themes of underworld and death.
During our second group meeting, I discovered that some members of my group had been thinking in parallel, getting progressively fascinated by similar subjects. One group member had become engrossed in the subject of digital graveyards: the strange situations that arise when a relationship has come to an end, or when someone has passed away, yet that person’s digital presence is still palpable. I jumped immediately on that idea, not just because it had relevance to my own design thinking so far, but also because the subject resonated with me on a personal level.
So our group talked about how death was a taboo subject in our everyday lives, and how art and literature served as ways to bridge that indescribable void.
We agreed to go our separate ways and observe and document our findings for our third group discussion.
02: Not Just Wallpaper: Exploring the Idea of a Smart City
Short summary:
When do smart city solutions fail?
When they are surface deep or ‘wallpapered’
When they do not tackle the “long-standing socio-economic inequalities”
What should designers do to avoid ‘wallpapering’?
Avoid positioning themselves on a higher moral plane
Immerse themselves in the environment they are designing for
A mission for our group:
Read more:
Even when the ‘smart’ parts are introduced into existing, established city frameworks such as London, it is too easy for this to happen in a way that only goes surface deep. In their article The ‘actually existing smart city’ Taylor, Zook and Wiig (2015) gave a poignant example of the Digital On-Ramps project which attempted to include the residents of marginalised areas by allowing them to learn relevant skills for entry-level jobs through the use of smartphones. The initiative failed because it did not attempt to tackle the “long-standing socio-spatial inequalities” which were the true reason why these neighbourhoods were disadvantaged in the first place. Such inequalities run so deep that they cannot be simply ‘wallpapered away’ with even the smartest technologies!
Image: My illustration of the metaphor of a wallpapered smart city
But how can one avoid ‘wallpapering’ in smart city design?.. I feel that the answer lies in how we as designers approach the city. This is explored by Dunne and Raby in their book Speculative Everything: design, fiction, and social dreaming (2013) where they propose that the designer is not “positioned on a higher moral plane... but like everyone else is immersed in the system.” As an example of someone on a “higher moral plane” they offer the architect Peter Eisenman and his famously non-compromising building designs.
Image above shows Peter Eisenman’s design for House VI
I recall being at a talk with Eisenman at the RIBA some years ago where he brazenly admitted that one of his house designs featured a column in the middle of the clients’ conjugal bed. When questioned about this by his clients, he declared that he had a grid to work to and that his vision would not be compromised - so the couple would just have to work around it (the poor couple were so smitten with him that they just agreed).
While in practice it is rare for designers to be as brazenly uninterested in the practicalities of their creations as Eisenman appears to be, they could nevertheless all too easily adapt the surface-deep approach shown in the ‘Digital On-Ramps’ project. So instead I propose that as designers, my group and I attempt to dig deeper, to immerse ourselves in the messy architectural and social past and present of London, and to see what opportunities for smart cities could arise from this journey. If we do so, we stand a better chance of avoiding both higher moral planes and wallpapering.
01: Hidden Layers: Exploring the Idea of a Smart City
Short summary:
Archigram’s vision for re-imagining city futures:
Contrasts with the clean modern-day stereotype of a smart city
David Green’s ‘Living Pod in the Ruins of the Blue-Collar City’ (1965): an old building giving birth to a new one
London’s layering of old and new:
An example: the Barbican Estate - a ‘machine for living in’ built on top of a mass burial ground and inspired by the ancient barbicans of the City wall
Imagining London as a smart city:
Exploring how the existing fabric integrates with the ‘smart’ parts
Exploring how the hidden fabric can be brought forth through this relationship.
Read more:
The stereotype of a smart city, as commonly portrayed in the media, often conjures up images of odd, clinical, brand new spaces, with imposing towers of glass, and stuffed to the brim with surveillance technology and robotics (just take a look at the selection presented in The Guardian’s articles on smart cities). At other times, yet through similar narrative tools, the concept becomes an opportunity to portray a dystopian world - as has been done in numerous iconic films and television series from Blade Runner to Black Mirror.
Archigram are a famous example of re-imagining city futures (spanning from the 1960s to present day), known for their portrayal of futuristic stackable and transportable ‘living pods’ and of an imaginary technological paradise. Yet, some years ago, in an exhibition catalogue of their work, I recall coming across this intriguing image by one of Archigram’s members, David Green (1965):
The image is entitled, ‘Living Pod in the Ruins of the Blue-Collar City’ and shows a ‘living pod’ not within a new structure, but nesting inside a crumbling old building. The old building is portrayed as if it is bursting open to give birth to the new one.
This image has prompted me to think how powerful the juxtaposition of old and new could be, especially in cities like London that have a rich and layered history reflected directly in its physical buildup - from the Ancient Roman times to today - and how the smart city technologies could find their place within this history.
The Barbican Estate is perhaps the best example of this. Allegedly designed to be a Corbusean “machine for living in”, it has in fact been built around the ruins of the ancient barbicans (defence towers) of the London Wall, from which it takes its name. The architecture of the Barbican Estate is referential to the ruins, with the semi-circular shape of the towers mimicked throughout the Barbican Estate’s architecture. Further, the new buildings have been erected on top of a mass 19-century Methodist burial ground. Thus, the rich layering of the Barbican Estate is both apparent and hidden, and deeply entangles the buildings themselves with the living and deceased occupants of the area.
Image: my collage of the Barbican Estate’s layered histories
So, imagining London as a smart city built from scratch is, to me, unthinkable. Instead, I am keen to explore the opportunity to understand the existing fabric of London, and to integrate the ‘smart’ parts within it in order to bring forth this hidden fabric in ways that may not have hitherto been possible.
