Sonic Fiction - Sonic Futures

A talk about the unexplored potential of a genre of sound studies and sound art described as Sonic Fiction*. Science fiction tells stories of future or parallel worlds, often re-defined by new technologies; but what if we use sound as a medium to explore these concepts? Amina is researching emerging speech and sound technologies to understand their future implications on society and ways of life. By understanding the mechanics and components of voice it enables us to both reproduce it synthetically, via digital code, but also comprehend it as a material to be shaped and sculpted to create new expressive possibilities in vocal formation and communication. The stories we tell are limited to the capacity we have to describe them - through the language and linguistics we use. Amina is working to expand the space between speech and sound for the potential to tell new and unversed stories. Through trying to broaden our vocal capabilities and aural perception does it give us an opportunity to disperse metanarratives and give way for more diverse ways of living? Equally, by blurring the space between speech and sound and collapsing existing patterns of speech can we find the essence of voice? - Pure vocal sonic signals awaiting conscious rendering and realisation. This presentation will present past, present and future examples of Sonic Technology, particularly its implications on voice, and give examples of how we might extrapolate their potentials to create Sonic Fictions for creatively and collectively imagining our Sonic Futures. * Originally a term defined by Kodwo Eshun, but limited in describing an afrofuturist viewpoint

Across The Sonic Border (Variations on 50Hz)

In this speculative scenario, the UK has started to use speech analysis as a key assessment for gaining access to the country. In addition, electrical network frequency analysis is used in law, forensics and other aspects of culture to mark or conceptualise time, because of its ability to timestamp recordings. People have become hyper-aware of its hum. English is still the fundamental language but people have reacted to this situation by forming their own speech communities, creating sonic borders and allowing them distinct ways of life. Populations have diversified their language not in terms of words but in terms of sound, due to the tone (on and around 50Hz = F-sharp) of the pervasive electrical hum. Presented as eight audio clips that can be listened to by inputting a headphone jack into a laser cut map, they can be listened to independently but also provide a linear or chronological narrative. Starting at the Dover border, in scene 1 the hum is loudest and most potent, gradually getting quieter through the scenes and having less influence, finally ending in scene 8 where there is no hum. Abbas-Nazari worked with a speech therapist and amateur singers to help develop and define the vocal parts through improvisation and role-play. Abbas-Nazari herself takes on the role of an outlaw speech therapist, within the narrative, through her teaching people how to perform their vocal parts, giving them the ability to code-switch to move across borders

Fostering natural world engagements: Design lessons & issues from, the My Naturewatch training programme

Nature's welfare is inter-twinned with humankinds’, requiring mass citizen-led action. Wildlife advocate Attenborough says, ‘we share responsibility for the future of life on earth, [we all have] the power to change’. The My Naturewatch project (NW) follows research through design approaches: deploying DIY devices, supporting new engagement methods between nature, technology and humans. The NW cameras assist participants in capturing images of ‘back garden’ wildlife. Authors position NW cameras as agent(s), enabling ‘designed engagement(s)’ establishing; agency, serendipity and impact. The article recounts a ‘Training Scheme’, providing nature organisation(s) methods to foster public engagement through DIY, accessible digital technologies. The scheme encouraged appropriation; suiting contextual, environmental and organisational requirements. Authors unpick experiences and issues, realised (through practice) by fourteen nationally acclaimed wildlife and conservation organisations, independently running workshops with NW tools. Findings report on issues and opportunities of; designed community engagement(s) for practitioners engaged with defining more sustainable practices

Designing for active engagement, enabling resilience and fostering environmental change

Contemporary societies are increasingly distancing themselves from nature; driven by rapid urbanisation, biodiversity loss, lack of connection, industrialisation, loss of green space and parental fear… all factors are reducing our care/empathy for nature. Conservation and grass roots reporting highlight nature’s wellbeing, requires impactful citizen led responses. Youth leaders of our time are holding up a mirror to adult humankind, stating ‘our world is on fire’, and demanding action. It is well known that interactions with the natural world provide health benefits, resilience, and prove transformative to our attitude, values and behaviour. The My Naturewatch project facilitates people’s engagement with their local environment, and by doing so, helps its comprehension. Observations of nature help connect, engage, and foster custodians, at a time where growing separation from wildlife necessitates active engagement. The work specifically challenges our understanding of ‘designed engagement(s)’, not as passive activities but as impactful active engagements, open to all. This article proposes criteria encouraging public participation within the natural world. It presents value to NGOs, change makers, design agents, individual agents and funding bodies. Thirty experts from design, ecology, conservation, museology, engagement, rewilding, wildlife and community work, were interviewed, informing ‘design for environmental change through active engagement’. The work identifies design’s role, in creating interventions that better engage people with the surrounding natural world, yielding long-term mutual benefits. The objective fosters active public nature engagement, identifying barriers, opportunities, and pitfalls, leading to nature engaged interaction(s)

My Naturewatch Camera: Disseminating Practice Research with a Cheap and Easy DIY Design

My Naturewatch Camera is an inexpensive wildlife camera that we designed for people to make themselves as a way of promoting engagement with nature and digital making. We aligned its development to the interests of the BBC’s Natural History Unit as part of an orchestrated engagement strategy also involving our project website and outreach to social media. Since June 2018, when the BBC featured the camera on one of their Springwatch 2018 broadcasts, over 1000 My Naturewatch Cameras have been constructed using instructions and software from our project website and commercially available components, without direct contact with our studio. In this paper, we describe the project and outcomes with a focus on its success in promoting engagement with nature, engagement with digital making, and the effectiveness of this strategy for sharing research products outside traditional commercial channels

Brick by Brick

This scenario based workshop hypothesised that in the future children and young people will be the driving force of the creative economy, formulating the design and aesthetic of our environments, objects and products. Meanwhile adults would facilitate the production at full scale, focused mostly in project management and manufacturing sectors. This proposal is based on the fact that youth culture is becoming more and more influential, coupled with young people becoming increasingly empowered by rapidly changing technology (e.g BBC Micro Bit). Meanwhile, large creative corporations are designing their workspaces to look and function like playgrounds (e.g. Google HQ) in order to try and encourage freer, more experimental, ‘child-like’ thinking and foster unrelenting innovation and enterprise. It also touches on how education and schooling are starting to operate more like business’ and commercial organisations - with less and less funding coming from central government potentially they will have to explore unorthodox ways to generate revenue. We asked the workshop participants, consisting of MA design students and professionals, to prototype future construction kits for children; intended to model and design our future built environments, wearable technologies, biological and ecological worlds. This workshop was devised with Lisa Bengtsson for the Growing with Design Conference, Gothenburg, Sweden. Ref: Knotty Objects: Brick by MIT Media La

Introduction to Naturewatch Cameras: Schumacher College

Workshop introducing postgraduate design ecology students to open-source camera devices for observing nature in their local environment. Participants learned how to build a camera kit and how to deploy it in scenarios that attracted wildlife, with a view to contributing wildlife data and images to a central repository. These workshops are also a way of troubleshooting potential issues with the prototypes to inform future designs

Follow up to Naturewatch Cameras: Schumacher College

Workshop looking at the resulting photographs that participants had taken with the open-source camera devices they were taught how to build at a previous workshop. Discussions and suggestions that arose from the participants using the cameras they had built

Naturewatch Exhibit at Sussex Biological Recorders Seminar

Workshop introducing members of the wider public to open-source camera devices for observing nature in their local environment. Participants learned how to build a camera kit and how to deploy it in scenarios that attracted wildlife, with a view to contributing wildlife data and images to a central repository. These workshops are also a way of troubleshooting potential issues with the prototypes to inform future designs

Introduction to Naturewatch Cameras: Sussex Wildlife Trust

Workshops introducing members of the public to open-source camera devices for observing nature in their local environment. Participants learned how to build a camera kit and how to deploy it in scenarios that attracted wildlife, with a view to contributing wildlife data and images to a central repository. These workshops are also a way of troubleshooting potential issues with the prototypes to inform future designs