report: Workshop Sentient Rotterdam with Mark Shepard

On November the 6th I joined the workshop of Mobile City with Mark Shepard as workshop leader. The goal of the workshop was to work out a critical design proposal for the city of Rotterdam. The participants were an interesting mix of cultural organisations, media artists, designers, architects and human scientists. They were combined in interdisciplinary groups of approximately 4 people with one workshop leader.

Many interesting project ideas came out of the rather short brainstorming time of about three hours. The projects can be viewed via some pictures of the maps people made during the workshop.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Our workshop leader was James Burke, a specialist in user experience, interaction design, strategy and co-founder of  VURB. One of the participants, Kristina Andersen, was our Rotterdam expert. Her organisation ‘The Patching Zone’ has been working in Rotterdam for some time now, developing projects with youth in the framework of ‘Go For IT’. The goal is to design an interactive urban game for Rotterdam, together with students, researchers and local youth. They developed a very good example of participatory creation work in new media. The other participants were Niels Hendriks, my colleague from the Media & Design Academy, and me.

After some brainstorming we found a starting point for an application. In Rotterdam there exists something with the name ‘probleembuurten’ (problem neighbourhoods). These neighbourhoods are thus perceived by government and citizens as a problem. Since we found it a bit of a strange definition, we started to think about what could be defined as a ‘problem’. We realized that finding something to be a problem is often a result of not knowing the cause of for example loud noise, disturbing behaviour and so on. When there is a lot of noise in a square, people might find it irritating. But if they would know that this noise is produced by two love birds kissing for the first time, this would maybe perceived as less of problem and rather cute.

We therefore thought that we should design a system that could ‘leak’ this kind of intimate information into the neighbourhood. We made a choice for the term leakage, because this answers to an important principle of critical design, namely that the design artefact or experience enters your familiar world as a strange element, to grasp your attention. Via this leakage qualitative information about neighbourhood events can be provided. Just like a company does not receive any qualitative information about his website by measuring clicks, ‘clicks in the street’ can’t be measured by just registering noise, complaints,… So our question is: ‘what are clicks in the street?’ Our designed leakage system would want to do more than measure clicks in the street via detector systems. It would collect intimate stories via central figures in the neighbourhood, like shop owners or kids, and spread/leak this via unexpected media.

Take the example of the shop owners. They could collect personal stories in their shop – since they do this daily anyway – and leak them randomly via their printed receipts to the visitors of the shop. Receipts always contain a little note about the shopowner (contact information, a logo,…). This note could be replaced by some intimate information about people in the neighbourhood. Clients in the shop could accidentally read the anonymous story of a person in his/her neighbourhood, like “yesterday my boyfriend organized a surprise party for my birthday. It was amazing, we danced until the morning”.

Via a game (in a newspaper for example) we would stimulate neighbourhoods to invent new unexpected ways via which people can leak their intimate information. This to engage people in the neighbourhood, to create an increased local awareness about the personal stories of people and maybe to increase tolerance.

This concept needed a lot (!) of improvements, but we had a nice time brainstorming, starting from the inspiring work of artists Mark Shepard and the Mobile City organizers Martijn de Waal and Michiel de Lange.