fields

‘Open a joint account with a forest’

Final day of the Halfway to the Future conference and it’s proven to be a quite brilliant coordinate in going someway to answering the question that fell out of the Hackathon in May: Do we have the data sets to move toward a Regenerative Future?

We evidently don’t, but Miek Dunbar and I have been on a little journey to explore this, hence ending up in Santa Cruz.

Ron Wakary’s talk began with a very simple statement to the effect of “choosing not to design through a more-than-human cosmology is the exceptional decision” which points to the same challenge, if current data sets are missing significant sources and voices that speak beyond the human, then we’ll perpetuate a degenerative culture/economy.

Using the kitchen as a metaphor to describe the gathering and organisation of living materials and knowledge for design, Ron discussed the pluriversality of kitchens, drawing attention to the diversity of practices and values, supporting a situated approach to design – cooking, eating, socialising. In many ways, recasting the kitchen as a place for a ‘post-human subjectivity’, it is easy to recognise an interdependence with non-humans.

Slow time was again, emphasised to slow down the process of instrumentalising knowledge and to act with humility, and with it a shift from ‘verticality to horizontality’ in design. Again reasserting the opportunities to identify interdependence across ecosystems.

Miek and I offered a short ‘lit review’ for the conference that “examines the limitations of current urban data infrastructures in representing more-than-human perspectives and explores pathways toward more inclusive, regenerative data practices”: Data Sets for Regenerative Futures: Cultivating Relational Ontologies

“This short paper examines the limitations of current urban data infrastructures in representing more-than-human perspectives and explores pathways toward more inclusive, regenerative data practices. It argues that prevalent data sets and knowledge repositories reflect anthropocentric ontologies, perpetuating the erasure of non-human subjects and diverse epistemologies. The paper identifies key challenges in developing more inclusive data infrastructures, including ontological incommensurability, the risk of cognitive injustice, and the need for expanded representational repertoires. Drawing on examples from Indigenous knowledge systems, multispecies ethnographies, and arts-based practices, the authors propose strategies for enriching urban datasets. These include centering marginalized perspectives, expanding participatory data governance models, and reimagining urban infrastructure as multi-species sensing apparatuses. The paper concludes by calling for the cultivation of relational data ontologies that can better capture the complex interdependencies between human and more-than-human worlds, essential for envisioning and realizing regenerative urban futures.”

Determined to turn up with an intervention, and not more questions, we introduced Kin Bank, and invited participants to ‘Open a joint account with a forest’. Synthetic data for more-than-human intra-actions is produced through Gen-AI based upon a ‘prompt’ provided at the point of naming a bank account for a forest or ecosystem. Once initiated, participants were able to review past transactions between ants, wind, bees, worms, soil etc. and receive notifications as new transactions took place.

As a speculation toward regenerative / more-than-human data sets through synthetic data, it was rich, playful and provocative. Minimal calls were made to ChatGPT, and the ‘prompt engineering’ by Miek constructed a theatre of notifications that were pushed throughout the day, continued to surprise participants and extend the range of intra-actions across an ecological imaginary.