The flexible design enables accompanying information and media to be changed according to audience. On some outings the ‘shed’ will contain materials for communicating research questions and outputs to academics and organisations to stimulate conversations about issues arising from the research. On other outings the shed will be equipped with community engagement materials.

The shed is designed to flat-pack to panels that will fit in the back of a small car, so it can be transported easily, without the extra cost of hiring a van.

The shed’s first outing was to the East Midlands Flower Show at Newstead Abbey with at team from National Trust.

Garden Shed Road Show at Newstead Abbey. Image: Liz Edwards

Mini-Rhubaphone in use in the Travelling Shed. Image: ©RedZebra & National Trust 2016

Simon Attwood showing panel structure. Back of shed showing shingle and shiplap design. Images : Liz Edwards

Beespoon.
We wanted to draw attention to the value of honey and the effort required for its production by drawing attention to the work of an individual bee in a hive. A worker bee will produce about a twelfth of a teaspoon on honey in her lifetime. To produce this honey we estimate she will visit 1837 flowers.
We created an installation where people made origami flowers in exchange for droplets of honey. For every flower made a button was pressed triggering a counter and peristaltic pump. Over the festival the beespoon was filled by the work of the participants.

The copper beespoon was made by jeweller, Cerys Alonso.

Origami flowers made by visitors to the Fruit Festival.

Honey dispenser used an arduino, peristaltic pump and TFT screen.

We sourced bee-friendly flower and grass seed from Scotia Seeds and packaged it with fragment of bee lore and gave to participants at the festival.

Augmented beekeeping suit
The research team interviewed beekeepers about beekeeping practices and folklore associated with bees. Snippets were drawn from the recordings and edited on the themes of disease, pesticides, shortages, familiarity and inexperience. Speakers were sewn into the beekeeping hat for an enclosed, intimate listening experience. The recordings were associated with Bluetooth Beacons and were triggered when visitors found markers hidden in the park space.
Testing the augmented beekeeping hat.

Telling the Bees

‘Telling the Bees’ comes from the tradition of beekeepers telling family news, (particularly family deaths) to the bees. The project aimed to uncover future folklore through sharing present and past bee lore and life. Anna and Sarah, students from Falmouth, worked to uncover thoughts and reflections through ‘cut-up poetry’, voxpops, and drawings.

Other prototypes
Many ideas were generated through the workshops. Several were presented and evaluated at the third workshop. These included an interactive sound installation and a sensory display incorporating bee smokers adapted as perfume dispensers to disperse the scent of Heather Honey, Beeswax and Propilis.
Appropriated bee smokers.
Sound panels, triggered by touch and movement.

The Walled Kitchen Garden at Clumber Park is the home to the Regional Apple Collection for the garden’s five neighbouring counties. The collections preserve heritage varieties, and also provide a key to social and cultural history of the area. For example, one apple variety is named after a pit pony called Ulland which alludes to the importance of mining in the area. The garden and former house were built using money from the mining industry and presence of mining in the area is even evident in the structure of the garden walls, which are sectioned to limit damage in the event of subsidence. The apples hold many stories of the garden and locality. This was another seed for the project.

The aim of the Audio Apples is to share stories of the Walled Kitchen Garden and the Apple Collection, told by people from the garden. The trees in orchards provide semi-enclosed story-telling spaces, where people can pause, listen and reflect. Wooden Audio Apples hang from the trees. When the wooden apple is plucked from the audio jack from which it hangs the audio track begins. The design allows audio content to be changed through the year reflecting changes in the seasons and developments in the garden. The aim is to grow a varied repository of stories to add to current collection of poems, stories, diaries and garden information. Writer and HighWire colleague Claire Dean, is currently creating stories that bring together myths and fairytales with landmarks in the Walled Kitchen Garden. Andy Darby, another member of the HighWire team, is editing the children’s stories and narrating the recordings. Over the summer we will be gathering stories from the Regional Apple Collection, ready for Apple Weekend in the Autumn.

The wooden Audio Apples have been turned by Gary Smith, a member of the Clumber Estate Team, from oak sourced from the park. It is important to us that the Audio Apples are materially and creatively rooted in their home. Many others from Clumber Park and Lancaster University have been involved in various aspects of making the apples and recording stories. Instrumental to the recording process is Dave Mackness, a Sound Recordist and Editor who came to work on the project through an internship supported by the HighWire programme.

The most recent version of the Rhubaphone, shown in the photo at the top of the page, has rhubarb stems clamped side by side, so the differences between the varieties can be seen more closely. The leaf stems are connected with wires to a Bare Conductive Touch Board. This is joined via a hosepipe to a speaker, concealed in a watering-can-rose. Holding the rhubarb in one hand and the watering-can-rose listening-device in the other visitors can listen to the rhubarb stories.

The Rhubaphone is in the Walled Kitchen Garden at Clumber Park throughout the rhubarb season.

Design Process
The design process has been shaped by values drawn from critical philosophy of technology. The Rhubaphone is intended to create a pause and draw attention to the particularities of the rhubarb varieties. It is also designed to stimulate sensory connection through touch and smell as well as visual cues.

The initial design resembled a Xylophone, prompting the name Rhubaphone. The name stuck but the design evolved. The box shape dominated the rhubarb leaf stems so we tried a thinner version, but the interaction felt clunky because of the wide variation in the rhubarb stems. Input from Cerys Alonso and Dave Jones at North Wales School of Art & Design stimulated the clamp design, including labels inspired by designs found in the garden’s museum. Along the way a musical wind chime version has been trialled. The current design has grown in size and has moved from a location in the glasshouse to a shed beside the rhubarb beds. It is important that the wooden frame is oak from Clumber Park and that the aesthetic is drawn from the garden. This helps to root it in its place.

The technology has changed as the physical design has been modified. The first version used an Arduino Uno, a Sparkfun MP3 Player and an MPR121 Capacitive Touch Sensor Board and the next replaced the Mp3 Player with a Raspberry Pi. The current version used a Bare Conductive Touch Board, which simplifies the construction and is quicker and easier to maintain in the garden environment.

The Rhubaphone has grown into its location and the hope is that it will continue to grow and respond to the needs of visitors and garden.

The egg is made from wood because of its sensory qualities; the way it warms in the hand, its smell, texture and weight, and (if partly seasoned), the way it ‘lives’ and changes over time. Its resonant qualities are also attractive. The shape is designed to fit well in hands. Critically wood is a poor conductor of electricity and focus is needed to hold the object so that a capacitive connection can be made with the metal contacts inside.

I’m researching the contribution that Critical Theory of Technology can make towards design processes and artefacts that support connection to nature. The Meditation Egg is an exploration of how embracing criticism of technology from selected writings from critical theory of technology might offer new possibilities for setting s design lens. The first artefact draws on the work of Albert Borgmann. He writes about the focal practices and focal things that ground us and give our lives meaning. Focal practices require attention and effort in contrast with technologies that provide “easily available commodity” and require little exertion and cause detachment. The machinery of the (technological) device slips into the background, as its commodity comes to the fore.

Borgmann acknowledges the impossibility (and undesirability) of a complete return to a “life of engagement” but if space for focal practices and other engagements to be asserted within technology paradigmatic consumption, which is a root of disengagement, can be challenged.
In this prototype I tried to create a focal object that would support focal practices. The practices would including collecting audio from nature as well as meditating on the particular place in which the recording was made. The idea is to support connection to natural places at times when it isn’t possible to physically be there. It is also intended to encourage mindful engagement through careful listening while out and about in nature. It doesn’t address some of the key aspects of focal practice, which are to do with community engagement. However, it doesn’t offer easy commodity, but requires effort and persistence. It is a digital-nature hybrid that is connected to its context, through materials and makers and priorities sensory engagement.

The first prototype contained an arduino with wave shield, SD card and homemade capacitance sensor. I wanted to draw attention to the wood and felt capacitive sensing was the right way to promote its tactile nature. Unfortunately the wave shield required quite specific audio formatting and this created a technological disruption that detracted from the process (though some might argue that the extra effort required to process the audio was in keeping with the effort associated with focal practices.) In a later version a Bare Conductive Touch Board was used because the audio could easily be recorded or copied onto the SD card used on the board. Consequently more attention was focused on meditation instead of audio processing.

The image below shows the inside of the Meditation Egg with Touch Board and speaker.

The image below shows the earlier version of the Meditation Egg containing the Wave Shield.

Click to see video clip.

(The video demonstration has been programmed with a much shorter engagement time prior to the audio. This runs contrary to my ‘Borgmann aims’… but it keeps the file size smaller.)

I have mixed feelings about the success of the Meditation Egg but the design process gave me things to think about in relation to values-led design and the tensions in designing digital-nature hybrids.

I designed several prototypes exploring these ideas, some of which are documented below.

Tea cards were part of tea culture for much of the twentieth century. Collectable sets were produced on a range of themes and were given away with packs of tea. Initially the back of the card held an advert, though later they provided information relating to the images on the front. These cards provide an emotional connection to the past. I proposed appropriating and adapting the concept to produce sets of coffee cards with a digital aspect, not present in the original design. The digital cards that contained multiple layers of information bringing together new and old. Watercolour maps of the coffee estates redrawn from Google Maps were layered onto cards that incorporated Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags and QR codes to get information and access to events in store and remotely.

In addition to the cards I designed interactive plinths for the Heritage and Innovation Centre. These contained a screen and RFID reader. Contemporary and heritage artefacts were assigned RFID tags and when these objects were placed on the plinth the tags triggered appropriate content. Some videos showed how the heritage objects were used, while contemporary utensils were used to demonstrate different methods of coffee preparation.

Click links to watch videos.

Video 1
Video 2

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tasseography 2

Omnipresent computing will change our physical and emotional relationship to the digital medium. As devices become smaller and are embedded within the environment there will be fewer artefacts to obstruct direct experience. As a result, people may become fluent with media ‘translation’ but the potential incongruity of these merging media is also of interest.

Click to go to Convergent Design.
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The invisibility of digital information associated with an object means that content can exist unnoticed. Embedding RFID tags preserves the integrity of the hand-made object but makes detection difficult. Timo Arnall of the Touch project & Jack Schulze from BERG have addressed this issue, desiging an icon based on the ‘readable volume’ of an RFID tag (www.nearfield.org).

This mark could be applied to some items of jewellery, following in the lineage of hallmarks, as above. However, practicality and aesthetic may prevent this kind of mark, raising further questions of presence.

This is a Convergent Design collaboration with jeweller, Cerys Alonso. Click to go to the Convergent Design website.

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