Projects

EQUI-Food is a pilot research project exploring citizen science methods for understanding urban soil health and nature connectedness. The project involved researchers from BIC Innovation in Cardiff, soil scientists from Royal Agricultural University and psychologists from University of Liverpool. We engaged over 130 people in testing methods through creating visual soil diaries of growing experiences. The study highlighted how soil health is challenging to understand in urban contexts due to the variability of impacts on soil quality and dependencies on additional knowledge and resources that are needed to grow food. The research was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council via the QUENCH network.

MoTH Cities: More-than-Human Data in the Smart City is a research project exploring how data can be re-imagined to directly benefit other species in the urban environment. The project was funded by EPSRC and led by Dr Sara Heitlinger at City University London, with collaborators from Goldsmiths Interaction Studio, London School of Economics and Warwick University. A series of creative workshops informed the design of a discovery box of activities to help practitioners, designers, researchers and workshop facilitators working in urban planning and smart city development to explore these ideas further. Design by Naho Matsuda. Photography courtesy of Daniel Parry, Open Lab 2022.

Ministry of Multispecies Communications is a masked walking workshop and training programme led by a fictional future government organisation. The walk was developed initially as part of a workshop, exhibition and situated action on the streets of Hasselt, Belgium, as part of the Participatory Design Conference 2018. In response to the many Covid-19 lockdowns and social distancing rules, sessions were subsequently also developed online using Slack, WhatsApp and Zoom to create remote distributed walks across the UK. Explore more about the Ministry on the following websites: DIS2020 Exhibition | Open Lab HCI Festival, 2020 | Hyper Island, 2021

racheltwisteddigits@gmail.com

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