 Folks, I would like to hear what your interests are, but I was just telling some of the other folks that Kat and I co-teach, and we're in Norway the next two weeks teaching a course for undergrads called Design for Non-Human Clients, and so we're asking our students to identify a plant or animal and then make some sort of app or social network for that plant or animal. And so that was part of the inspiration. It's also something we've been thinking about for a few years. But yeah, I would love to hear about your guys' ideas for incorporating other organisms besides humans in our cybernetic systems. A round of introductions will be good. So my name is Kat Kramer, and I am an artist. I co-run two organizations, Zach. One is called the Center for Genomic Gastronomy and the other is called Co-Climate, and they equally deal with food and climate change and technology and people's relationship to those things. My name's Erin. I'm a user experience architect and co-founder of an open source software company called NONE, and I'm mostly designed for humans, but I really like this idea of designing for other things that aren't humans, and I've always been really interested in smart home technology and sensors that I could potentially in the future tie into my house plants. And then someday if I had a house with a yard and chickens and beehives and things, that would be cool too, but I'm kind of limited right now to an apartment with house plants. But so ideas for the future, I'd love to grab them. Hi. I'm Jesse. I make stuff. Some physical stuff, historically mostly software. I've built software for non-humans, but it was software for other software, not for things that live and grow on their own. I'm Irv. I'm a professor, and one of my main areas of interest is the impact of what we do on human health and the environment, and so this topic really fascinates me. I'm Dane. I'm a student of my professor. I study computer science, and I was just curious about what this was all about. Hi. I'm Kevin. I'm a PhD student at Harvard, and I work on folding robots, or robots that fold themselves up, and I'm interested in how robots can be integrated into our lives in harmonious ways. I'm Jess. I'm a web developer and also a owner of two parents, and an iguana, and I constantly try to find ways to use technology and all kinds of other things, and other computers to improve their life and improve their environment, so any further ideas I can do or share what I've already learned is awesome. I'm Tim. I write about architecture and design, and so I came here because I'm really interested in cyborgs at the scale of landscapes. One of the groups I do a lot of work with is called the Dredge Research Collaborative, and we are interested in all the technologies around erosion control and prevention and that kind of thing, and how that reshapes at very large scales the planet. I'm Zach. I'm an artist and a professor, and Kat mentioned our group, a collaborative design program in Portland, Oregon, and the next two weeks the students are looking at this intersection of technology, the environment, and humankind. So I think it might be interesting if people have maybe some examples they've seen of prototypes or imagined projects that are really inspired by. I know that we have a definitely a hardware hacker actually making stuff for pets, but one of the things that got me thinking about this a long time ago now is the Center for Tactical Magic, which is a really interesting art group that proposed to put volumes, and if the old growth force were logged, the Insects Editor would fire rockets at loggers, and it's really an absurdist crazy idea, but that was really inspired by that notion of arming non-humans with a technological system, not because I actually want anyone to have more armament at all, but just as a sort of provocation. And so that's one of the things that got me really interested in the topic. Like, was that eight or years ago now? That's one of their proposals. Juan, I was trying to basically just create an optimal and comfortable environment, sort of trying to do, I know with Boston, it gets really cold in the winter, and occasionally you have even lost heat sometimes due to oil issues and lots of roommates, so I sort of ended up using a combination of various heating utilities, heated perches, heating panels, to create a birth-state sort of heated environment for them, so you know they're always comfortable that way. I've utilized various things via YouTube and Internet Radio to help keep them entertained during the day while I'm at work or circus, so there's always something going on, and as I mentioned briefly earlier when I was on vacation one time, I actually also have them set up on a views online stream so I can check on them, see what they're doing, and if I notice that they're getting very anxious, noisy, and upset, I actually recorded a video of myself on my laptop, sending calming words, uploaded to YouTube, promoted into my home machine from vacation, played the YouTube video for them, and was able to sort of interact with them that way and calm them down and keep them happy, and anything I really do to help sort of improve their environment to give them more fun, more entertainment, and more comfort is really what I'm trying to do. So I have a question, and this is the question that occurred to me when I first saw the topic, and then when you were talking about what you were talking about just now, do you think it's possible to design for the environment without anthropomorphizing? Because I don't know that a tree wants to be protected from a logger, maybe it does, but how do we know that? And is it somewhat presumptuous of us to think that it does? I think it's such a hard question in this space. One of the techniques we've been using in our classes is letting students do that first and foremost. It's like, okay, to try that as a technique if they're not really disrupting the non-human. We use a lot of the metaphors of client relationships, so we have students go out and find a non-human eat lunch with it, understand its nutrient cycle and its waste stream. But another way in is if we can never know what a non-human wants or needs as humans, what do we need in relation to that? So we use ecosystem services as one way of relating to non-humans to understand the services that they might provide for human kinds. And then since we want those, to give them things that make those better for us. But this is like a big deep ecology question, right? Like how do we get beyond these anthropomorphic things? Yeah, I think another thing that's interesting is we've been throwing around a little bit planetary sculpture. And so, you know, humans are just for our sheer size and number. We are sculpting the planet, but kind of unconsciously. And so the idea is, well, what if we were a little bit more thoughtful about the things that we do to change the planet? And so by opening up this idea of designing for non-humans, it's not necessarily negating the human. It's including that in the space, but being a bit more considerate of everything else as well. So taking into consideration ant or actor network theory and how every act has an effect on everything else. And yeah, as you know, designing consciously for the world around us. First thing that comes to mind is home design. And I know a lot of homes, at least in the Alston Brighton area, will have issues with birds, finding little holes to nest into a roost into. And oftentimes, learners have to find a way to basically kick the guys out, which isn't cool, but they're nice. They get rid of bugs and all other important things in the environment that I could go into, but no one right now. But, you know, homes designed specifically to have areas for, you know, other animals in the area, squirrels, birds too. We know that they're going to be living in here, we'll design it specifically, maybe get some use out of it, use Sizer for local plant and wildlife that we can use and work from that and sort of designing a housing system that rather than try to block all this out incorporates into a more intelligent. I just thought of something sort of along the not necessarily considering the environment that we put things in. A friend of mine who is an architect and very environmentally conscious was tracking. They at one point changed the street lights that they used the lights in the street lights to make them very, very much brighter at night than they were. And there was a single street light that happened to be right under a tree on his street. And he noticed after they made the switch in the light bulbs or whatever they did there to really increase the brightness at night that that tree in the spot that was all around that light post all of the leaves very quickly died. And that whole part of the tree died right there because it was so bright at night after they switched out the light bulb that the tree just couldn't cope with that anymore. And he was very distressed about that. And I thought that was really interesting because that's not something that occurs to me that often, but you could definitely see how we change the technology in something like a street light and it has immediate effect on the vegetation right around it. There was actualists for his client. And that was a kind of curious client to work with because how do you design for something you inherently can't see? Or actually, there's also what's the movement in the UK? The I think, yeah, there's I can't remember the specific name, but there is an organization that's encouraging darkness and they have actually created sort of national parks, dark zones, so that you can see the stars and and yeah, there's sort of a bit of a movement on that front as well. So would you consider, for example, terraforming Mars as as an example of what we're talking about here, totally changing an environment, which right now is arguably pretty dead. But you know, sending technology out to completely change the surface of a planet. Would that would that be a client? Would Mars be a client? We we've sort of like, I think cases, introduction, talk, looked back and said, you know, we in some ways we've always been cyborgs, any technology tools. In some ways, we've always been terraforming like the part of like the human ecology ideas that were animals within this system with other animals and organisms. And so before we even go to Mars, maybe way of thinking about it is we already have these augmented ecosystems that we exist within like the light and that we already had this tech that was affecting light. It was only when it really affected it and killed it that we were more conscious of it. So a little bit earlier, you were speculating what you thought this this group might be talking about. And you had some really interesting ideas about pipelines and measuring or understanding the surface of the ocean or the the ocean's bed or something. I wondered if you could elaborate on that idea a little bit more. So what you're remembering is so we have all these cables that are really good and transmitting lots of data. And then we all have all of the previous cables that were laid down there. It's really expensive to bring those cables back up. And so what scientists are beginning to do is you can run signals along those like old copper cables and depending on what is happening with the stations in between, you can get information about the situation with the cables. You can use that to measure movement under of the ocean bed and gather other environmental data. And so we have accidentally wired up certain channels with substantial amount of sensors, right? They weren't meant to be sensors. They were meant to be conduits and now they've become sensors. So I was going to mention that I had gone to Ireland a couple years ago and one of the things that was really interesting there was looking at the history on the ecology. So the entire idea of having peat bogs to harvest as something to burn. Those peat bogs came about because people settled on the island and cut down all the trees. And so there was this, like what we think of as the ecology now is something that humans had already terraformed. And so it's not something that is, I think that there's a tendency to think of it as something new. Like we are going to go out and we are going to terraform as opposed to we have already been terraforming for a long, long time. I think it's one metaphor that might be useful is there's a lot of user interaction coming out of computing that then bled over into the rest of the design world like, oh yeah, we should ask users what they want or observe them using things. And there's maybe an interesting backtracking with non-human cyborgs and augmented ecologies like, oh yeah, we're always already affecting our environment with our extended capabilities with technologies. So we should do that more thoughtfully. And yeah, so it's a bit like this. And it's amazing that, what's the name of the, is there a project or consortium around this cable sensing? Yeah, I don't remember. Well, someone out there will, or we'll find the Twitter. Yeah. I think partly that's more valuable as the backwards looking way as we move forward. So it's not like a break. Ooh, it's meek. I think also in the, if we're going to do the cyborg thing, right, there's a marked difference in the world of erosion control between a kind of 1960s heroic infrastructure, engineering, hard lines between water and land, like armored put down concrete, what those sort of approaches and beginnings of new approaches that deal with and enhanced feedback loops, right, that recognize that feedback loops exist. And so one famous project in the Netherlands, Netherlands, by the way, if you're like at all into erosion, like a country that is largely undersea water is a really good country to look at. So they did a thing called a sand engine where, so the problem with sand and beaches is that you put the sand there and it probably doesn't want to be there. And so then it gets eroded away. And so current technology largely means you just truck out more sand. What they did instead is they put us, they did a bunch of math and figured out a way to put a sandbar that's sort of a very odd shape such that when currents hit it, it would redistribute the sand along the shore. And so it would require them to do the replenishment far less often, right. And so they designed a system that for a certain period of time worked with entropy instead of trying to hold entropy off. So talking, you know, just jumping off what you're talking about using using nature to control nature, right. I think that's a really important idea. And you know, again, it goes to the deep ecology thing, whose businesses that have us to control nature, maybe what's happening to the planet right now is nature's way of saying bye-bye. You know, you've had your time here and now we want to get back to where things were before. But assuming that we want to make it habitable for us, then probably the things that are going to be most successful are where we work in harmony with nature, in communion with nature instead of trying to, you know, do our technological things to prevent nature from doing what is natural. So I came in late. I don't know if Christopher Alexander has already been brought up. But he, so he was originally known for the Timeless Way of Building, which is a pattern language for building buildings that are livable and usable. And he went on, his current work is on neighborhoods. And how do you build sustaining, self-sustaining neighborhoods? How do you grow self-sustaining neighborhoods? I think that the idea of a pattern language has a lot of power for ecological engineering on a pragmatic scale. I was also struck about sort of some of the quantified self things. You were asking about how do we know what nonhumans want? How do we know what humans want? So I don't like, I hate putting tech first, but I think there's a promise of people prototyping different new ways and need not involve electricity or digital technology. But new tools for measuring and assessing and checking in and asking organisms and things other than human, kind of what they want or how they're doing or, you know, wait, they're amplifying things tough. There's really specific ways in like environmental engineering to measure things and ask for, is this going to be successful or not based on our needs? And I think actually, as artists, there's, we're excited about those messy metaphors. I think it's totally great to like make some tool to ask the plants how you feel. And we have lots of plants at Tweet, you know, sharks that have RFID on them. So there's examples of like really in your face augmented organisms all over the planet. I think also anthropomorphizing is a good empathy building mechanism, whereas you wouldn't necessarily consider it at all beforehand. If you're suddenly like, well, you know, how does that, you know, should I care about that tree? Should I care about chopping it down to make room for my house or whatever it is? It's like, well, if you think about it as a client, for example, you might want to keep it alive, right? If you think the base, the base premise is things want to stay alive. Maybe they don't always, but you know, so then building for that and to do, oh, it wants to stay alive and it wants to be healthy and it wants to be and it wants to thrive. And so, yeah. Isn't the the decision to pick one or another thing as a client already kind of incredibly fraught? Like every every tree that is there is a bush, right? Like a forest is the way trees in forest work is by choking out all the other plants that are trying to grow in that forest. Recently, I was doing a little bit of research and the thing is, in some parts of the United States where the fire departments get really good and prevent forest fires, they actually do have to do some controlled burning, because oftentimes with trees in large forest, they need to occasionally have a good burn down, get that nutrients back in the soil so new things can grow. And trees are going to want that. But for the rest of the forest, it's important for it to happen. And also toss in, you know, even for other animals, if they want something, it doesn't necessarily mean it should happen. My birds want all my ramen noodles. It isn't good for them. I'm not going to assess any like that is not what they need as a client, even though that's what they want. So it's also a matter of figure what, not necessarily what it needs or wants, but what is, in a sense, best for it going forward, both for your needs and its needs. There's sort of the assumption there that preservation or the status quo is our goal or is and I think that that's especially in ecology, that's never the case. Everything is it's about where do we go next rather than how do we keep things alive? Everything's going to die. So I happen to know a bit about some transformations that have happened in the field of chemistry in the past 15 years where a term called green chemistry has emerged, which is based on some people sitting around and coming up with so-called 12 principles of green chemistry, 12 concepts that if you really care about doing chemistry in ways that are safer for human health and the environment, you will you will respect these 12 concepts. And I think maybe something like that would be a good outcome from the folks that are thinking about this. You know, what what would the eight or the 12 or the 16 principles of designing for non-human organisms be? I mean, I think the point is well taken, right? That's in you the second you start designing, you're including and excluding certain things. That's that's the difference between academia and intervening in the world. I think and that's not a critique. They have their places but what this might these kinds of lenses might add is just making those decisions at different scales with more consideration and like focusing on an organism or species mix or a landscape really, you know, you need to take those all into consideration. But partly I think in design because if you were going to do a full systems analysis, there's rarely time or money for that. Having some really well thought out heuristics or rules of thumb that you're talking about could be really helpful because so often when we talk to like industrial design students or students who want to make stuff, even just talk about ending end of life issues with their materials. You know, it was not considered so bringing in some other clients that have a say that aren't just there, the company could be quite interesting to have the voice of the table. Yeah. So but yeah, there's always you're always excluding things the second you start being like this and not this. I think one one person that's been kind of inspiring for us in this space is Natalie Jeremy Jenko. I didn't know this artist. Case showed her project from like 20 years ago. That was the the trip wire was the network traffic line. But in the last sort of 10 years she's transitioned to doing stuff called the environmental health clinic and sort of building biotechnologies that connect humans and other organisms. And so I know one of her projects was in the Hudson River with fish and sort of visualizing right their patterns, but also creating these gummy worms that could be humans key or the fish could eat that has she leading agents that process the mercury. So a food for both organisms that you could sort of share amongst each other. That was a super low tech solution. And there was kind of fancy high tech, blanky light thing. You were nodding in in a confusion or approval or disapproval. So it was I know her and she did the inner species cookbook. Was she in collaborate because there's also an architecture firm called the Living in New York who also did a thing with the Hudson River and fish. And I'm trying to remember if that was the same thing or if they each. And it was like so their thing was like they made a floating grid and when there were fish coming by lights would turn on so you could like you could like have a sense that there are fish at all because there's a lot of misunderstanding in New York about how poisoned or unpoisoned the Hudson is. Things are pretty OK now. They also did one in Korea. They made a they made a like mini map of the city and then they put sensors in all the different parts of the city to see how badly the air was polluted and then the map would glow and so they fool around with these kind of the idea of the feedback loop being about making it consciously making invisible systems or actors visible to people in a kind of playful cartoonish fun. Art way. So I'm curious what are some of the things that your students have done in the past that really blew you away. Well we've done it with graduate students of Portland as well. There was one project where one of the students was really interested in space junk and in order to to clean up space junk and thinking about all of the zombie satellites and sort of other aspects. She proposed putting a trash collection of the moon sort of launch out and funded by rich people and then that could start to fund the rest of the space junk cleanup. But so the idea was to have a manned mission to the moon to go and sort of look at the the leftovers including possible contamination. Yeah there's an auction. The idea was to auction off the space junk is like high end art sculpture and so then you know make it super desirable. So you'd have billionaires you know trying to buy these sculptures and bidding against each other to fund the space junk cleanup. And there's a right there's apparently a ring of human feces and urine around the planet from the early manned space flights when they eject of the waste. We should the internet's out there. I've been told it's true. But so I think the part of the idea too was like you know scooping up some of that goodness and and bring it back. But she said she had a really amazing diagram of how this was all going to happen. And the darkness guy was also quite interesting because he started the project not knowing that there already was a pretty strong movement around these. I think they're called darkness parks. But it's about reducing light pollution and having sort of zoned areas sort of like a fair day cage like people actively want to seek out spaces where they can't get. They want to discourage certain signals and have other ones. Right. So you want to discourage light and actually see the stars and to think about the scale that that that's required to do that is pretty phenomenal because light pollution travels pretty far. So it actually creates a sort of interesting no go zones dark sky initiative. That's pretty good. Just to build. I've had the microphone a lot actually. So. So if somebody else wants to please take it from me right now. OK. So I think whenever we're I think this conversation if I'm interpreting it correctly it's trying to understand the world around us better. Is that the point of enabling non human things to have something that we can understand. So to me this is an effort to be to enjoy our world more. That's that's what I'm really seeing it as is just a yeah being you know in the world very like present Zen you know kind of idea. I think that's really what I'm getting out of this. Well that's not really even just us enjoying the world but allowing other things to co-enjoy it with us. Oftentimes previously it's been us enjoying it at the expense and at the cost. And you know we've been augmenting ourselves for a while not only not even just hybridically but with tools since day one and they're being able to sort of give that extra ability and give that extra power to non humans so that you know they're also allowed to enjoy the world in a moon at the same fashion but in a similarly more empowering way that we have is you know I think also a part of the goals. I'm guessing. So I again I don't know if it was mentioned before I came in but the companion animal manifesto is amazing and also by Donna Haraway and it sounds like it would be like one of those things from academic feminism that but it really is and it's amazing and great. The companion animal manifesto about our relationship with domestic and cated animals in really cool and fun ways that and my poor cat now has like the automated laser pointer and you know it's because the poor cat is bored because she has no mice to no work to do so but yeah I think that there's a lot there about how do they enjoy themselves. I think domesticated pets and animals aside I think a lot of the rest of the organisms around the world would prefer that we completely stay out of their way and not put wires and things on them. And like if I kind of think that it's a really interesting question but I think it's also important to acknowledge that with just satellite imaging almost every organism on earth is surveyed by us already at some resolution or not. So there's not I think it's not it's an interesting debate about how much more to intervene in natural systems. But I think it's also important to acknowledge the level of surveillance and the level of data capture that we already do around organisms and think about which of that we should actively ignore and keep out of our systems almost like we do with privacy for humans. But also to yeah we're doing it at a huge huge scale with all kinds of sensing and it doesn't need to be invasive or it doesn't need to be putting wires on things. But yeah it's happening. And even if you just consider the built environment a form of technology setting urban boundary growths and that kind of thing helps them to helps you know some perception of but there's organisms living with us everywhere. I mean on our bodies in our bodies in in an urban environment especially there's I can't remember his name there's a guy in New York who does kind of tours looking at nature in New York and then there's Mark Dion who set up a hut in Madison Square Gardens to watch to watch the nature that passed into catalog it and yeah there's it's also not an us and them necessarily but more of a we conversation. And also if you go look at YouTube you can see the literal hoops that squirrels will jump through to participate in our experiments as well like you and they in fact you prefer that sometimes to food that is easy to get because it is interesting and fun and like other animals it doesn't have to be in us doing things to them thing necessarily unless we conceptualize it that way it can be participatory or my favorite design for non-humans yogurt right we have a whole gut microbiome that's not human it's just like live in there inside of us and we often try to control it in certain ways and more and more we're trying to do it thoughtfully and doing pretty bad job of it so those are the rules of thumb and heuristics that actually maybe some traditional technologies were quite good at this and yogurt would be interesting right communication medium between you and your gut microbiome but I so I'm really interested in this conversation later as well about whether these metaphors work for you or not because I because I think you have a really good point we we don't want to be sticking wires on stuff I'm not interested in that