During today’s lecture, Alex talked about this historical lighting tower in San Jose. Something that I found very interesting was the description of “violence and nefarious activities” that “were happening all around”, being “moved to the shadows of that light” after it was erected.

Photo Source

This made me think of the Guardian article I referenced earlier about parks at night. Specifically, how violence and nefarious activities are relocated rather than eliminated when they’re blocked from one specific space. Right now, parks at night are in the shadows of the light of cities. While central roads and squares are lit and populated at all hours, parks and some alleys are the parts that remain in the dark.

My group is exploring the emotions of parks and how they can be measured. We discuss a large number of ideas and split them up for further research. One of the ideas that I chose to look into was listening to animals.

The Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago actively measures wild species’ stress hormones to ensure that they’re as calm as possible. This isn’t as invasive as I’d thought. One technique involves collecting feces and running tests to compare the levels of stress hormones to an established baseline. This is a technique that could be implemented in any park, though not as easily in a zoo where animals are caged.

This Japanese tool claims to translate dog parks into six emotions that help pet owners understand their dogs needs.

This idea seems more whimsical, but the concept of distinguishing emotions in different animal sounds has merit. I’ve come across a lot of research on analyzing different species’ calls and communication.

• Would it want more people inside?
• Would benches be lonely or offended if no one sat with them?
• Litter bins might be mad if someone threw trash on the ground
• Maybe oaks are happy when squirrels bury their acorns so they can grow into threes themselves
• Maybe the park gets stressful when construction gets too close to its edges
• Pigeons are probably unhappy when kids chase them
• Seagulls are probably happy when they steal food

Google Drive

I started by thinking about park emotions by looking at a “feature” of parks that already has emotions: the wildlife.

This interesting Guardian article on animal emotions talks about ways that people have been trying to study animal emotion scientifically. MRI studies of dogs have shown their brains to react similarly to humans’ when exposed to emotional sounds like crying and laughing. Goats with a history of trauma were observed to be more “optimistic” about new areas of their enclosures than other goats.

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Parks can have squirrels, pigeons, seagulls, geese, ducks, and swans that sometimes interact directly with humans. They can have smaller birds, pelicans, deer, mice, and foxes that tend to interact less with humans.

At our last meeting, we talked through new approaches we could take to look at parks and discussed until we had narrowed to five hypothetical scenarios:

1. What if parks had emotions?
2. What is pollution was so bad that there was no more fresh air?
3. What if parks were underground?
4. What if cities were so overdeveloped that there was no more space for parks?
5. What if parks designed parks? (How would they feel about how people interact with them?)

We each had three votes to cast to decide on our next focus area. Our top choice was number 1. We liked that there was some scientific backing to plant “emotions” and wanted to find out more.

To help us think more creatively, Hae shared this video on speculative design that helped us all better-understand the idea.

In our last group meeting, we tried some speculative brainstorming, thinking about different possible scenarios and how they might affect how parks look and how people interact with them.

One of the ideas my group had in our last meeting was to think about our own ideal parks. Mine is very simple and quiet. I would also like it to be close to where I live or on the way to somewhere I walk frequently.

Google Drive

“58% of visitors come to enjoy the scenery and landscape, which makes this the main reason for visiting a national park.”

The most common activity that people do while visiting national parks is “walking” at 40%. Another 12% spend their time “relaxing”. There are some activities in National Parks that don’t equate to your typical city park, but are still low-energy, relaxing things like driving around and sightseeing.

http://www.nationalparks.gov.uk/students/ourchallenges/tourism

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Yesterday, my group went to a park near City and approached many visitors with questions about their relationship with parks.

We also spent some time sitting and observing the park which was very busy. Most people were sitting alone or in small groups relaxing or eating lunch. One group was exercising in the middle of the park and about six people were walking their dogs.

A group finished their run in the center of the park where they did some coordinated exercises:

Some unleashed dogs met and played together:

Yesterday morning, I went to a “Breakfast Briefing” hosted by Catapult on avoiding inadvertent exclusion in smart cities to ensure that they are accessible.

The talk was brief and high-level, but I took away some important points:

• Build on what’s already there, don’t replace it (This made me think of Citizen Jane)
• Talk to people in the community to figure out what they need
• “A good idea is better than a new idea”

Catapault’s site

Update (16/11):

In class today, we talked about assessing sources of information to determine what motivations they might have and to evaluating if these motivations affect what we can take from the research.  One of the questions posed was “who is using the term ‘smart city'”.

This reminded me of questions asked about the term ‘smart city’ in the Catapult talk. Some guests thought that the term ‘smart city’ was inherently exclusive because it likely appealed most to the young and somewhat wealthy and also drew a bad comparison to other cities because it implies that they are not “smart”.

This helped further clarify the concept in my mind of using a smart approach to designing for a park, but not necessarily creating a “smart” park in the way that I was originally trying.