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The Design Journal
An International Journal for All Aspects of Design
ISSN: 1460-6925 (Print) 1756-3062 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfdj20
Climate Anticipation: working towards a design
proposal for urban resilience and care
Jennifer M Z Cunningham & Sue Fairburn
To cite this article: Jennifer M Z Cunningham & Sue Fairburn (2019) Climate Anticipation: working
towards a design proposal for urban resilience and care, The Design Journal, 22:sup1, 1697-1714,
DOI: 10.1080/14606925.2019.1595002
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14606925.2019.1595002
Published online: 31 May 2019.
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Running with Scissors, 13th International Conference of the EAD, University of Dundee, 10-12 April 2019
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Climate Anticipation. Working towards a
design proposal for urban resilience and care
Jennifer M Z Cunninghama*, Sue Fairburnb
a Ma-tt-er, London, UK
b Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Vancouver, Canada
*Corresponding author e-mail: jennifermzcunningham@gmail.com
Abstract: The ‘winter of…’ and the 'hottest day since…' are narratives that describe
our experience with a climate that informed our behaviours of the time. What was,
isn’t necessarily what will be, and as global climate change shifts and pushes us into
unfamiliar climatic experiences, we seek a more meaningful way to anticipate climate
change. In this instance climate is viewed as a disruptive element in society with its
shift, apparent unpredictability, and impact affecting those less equipped to
anticipate. With extreme changes in temperature, high air pollution levels, and lack
of rain water, climate change is felt and seen. CAPE (Climate Anticipation Personal
Environment) is a conceptual framework to inform society of impending
environmental extremes by communicating immediate futures. Four case studies
explore current technologies being applied in our surrounding terrestrial and
extraterrestrial environments. Together they represent our anticipated
materialisation of CAPE. This paper seeks to enable vulnerable communities to be
better prepared through warning systems, to better seek relief through
interventions, and to develop anticipation and care in large cities, those lacking green
spaces and natural approaches in order to align climate anticipation with the needs
of society. [STYLE: _RwS Abstract]
Keywords: Climate Change, Anticipation, Sensing, City, Communication
1. Introduction
An abundance of data exists to help us understand and alter our behaviours and inform our climate
resilience, however, we remain ever challenged by our ability, or inability, to realise its’ relevance to
our person and our accumulated urban behaviours. The material aspects of climate are held in the
matter they affect as its sensorial capacity clings to incidents. Changing environmental habits,
labours, and traumas, decay and regenerate under our feet and before our eyes.
Try to imagine two strangers passing on the street, the fibres of CAPE (Climate Anticipation Personal
Environment) intertwine as they brush past one another. The material grip exchanges data through
proximity. Once passive passersby share a tangible correspondence, the immediacy paralleling the
level of intentionality on a spaceship. Just as information is exchanged in the cloud, as a data
conversation via satellites, it also occurs at a much more intimate scale on the ground between
material, people and their surrounds.
JENNIFER CUNNINGHAM, SUE FAIRBURN
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CAPE is understood to be a distinct way of exploring and doing. Aspects have been prototyped, but it
remains immaterial and unwearable at this time. What began as a material fabulation has become a
methodology, not a method (following Tunstall 2013), which encourages a way of talking about
climate change, society, and how we monitor and make sense of the environments we are passing
through.
CAPE explores the socio-ecological as a coefficient system beginning with developments upon the
authors work in thought experiments and systems thinking (CAAS - City As A Spaceship). Building
upon this familiar platform, as a means to communicate futures, CAPE considers current work of
others on climate and sense-making as well as key writers and thinkers work on the topics of
survivalism, anticipation and care.
Donna Haraway’s continuing development of the SF acronym, exercised through her stance in
staying with the trouble, is where we position CAPE. Haraway’s SF acronym is comprised of many
interweaving concepts, for CAPE the pertinence exists in the inclusion of ‘science fact’ alongside
‘speculative fabulation’ as it encourages the heuristic and factual to coalesce. Considering our place
in the Chthulucene, CAPE works within the problem in order to keep moving.
Alongside Haraway we draw from the work of Forensic Architecture, a design collective bringing
narrative to the realms of data accumulated from the actions of citizens, data banks of governments
and publically available satellites, ‘making sense’ of history and historical events. These reflect the
position outlined by Matt Ward (2017), who argues that the speculative trajectory that design has
followed needs to change and redirect itself along a route of care, with a narrative accessible by
everyday citizens.
CAPE comes from a place that is messy, imperfect and actively generative. It relies on collective
thinking and a recognition of the inseparable threads of society, ecology and technology. Following
Cameron Tonkinwise (2017) we find it necessary to consider nothing in isolation due to the inherent
interlinkedness of social stresses. CAPE demonstrates this premise and draws from the collective
living environment of a spaceship, where closed-loop, multicultural and confined with limited
resources, remoteness and isolation informs possible options for survival. This paper aims to
demonstrate the approach through the themes of reciprocity, sense-making, resilience, hope and
trust, leading us to communicating futures through insights and actions.
1.1 Reciprocity: City as a Spaceship (CAAS)
City As A Spaceship (CAAS) is a platform of work originating from a female collective of designers,
architects, engineers and scientists. It is a well documented thought experiment that explores
reciprocities between extra-terrestrial and terrestrial living (Fairburn et al, 2014). The CAAS platform
was founded in the exploration of science fiction (SF) science fact (SF) speculative fabulation (SF)
string figures (SF) and societal fictions (SF). CAAS began with the premise to take Space beyond
science fiction to science fact. CAAS, as citizen science, endeavors to provoke awareness of the
inseparable challenges we face by visualizing the state of our current environment through various
lenses (Fairburn et al, 2017). A spaceship in its’ ideal state is a fully functioning biosphere where
resources are carefully re-created; water and air are recycled and put back into the loop. An ideal
spaceship is a technologized habitat that includes biological systems, leaves no trace, offers life-
support systems in a full closed loop, and is powered by renewable energy. CAAS’s approach focuses
on the key themes of cities, technology, environment, and society – thus drawing the paradigm of
spaceships – onto and into cities.
Climate Anticipation. Working towards a design proposal for urban resilience and care
3
1.2 Sense-making: Climate and Data
As we move through cities, we carry data – mobile phones, wireless nodes, computing power, and
sensor platforms – we emit signals, we convey information to others. The urban environment is one
part of this, it is the true ‘cloud’ that we inhabit as we move between locations, transit through
spaces and navigate our surroundings making our location visible as we journey through our day. We
constantly share our observations of what we see and what we do with others. We use data to
communicate problems with traffic and the unexpected, dangerous routes and unexpected
encounters with urban skunks. Equally, we share opportunities, such as a preferred route (a tree-
lined street showing it’s finest autumn colours) or an unexpected concert. Digital pathways within
our cities send instructions to buildings and public spaces – why? – for our comfort and to reduce
energy demands, but this can also contribute to individual or group-based ‘environmental bubbles’
as systems learn our daily routines, usage patterns and preferences.
The greatest climate impact is seen in cities and Planet Earth has seen a run of 627 months in a row
of above-normal heat (Khan, 2017). The evidence supports that the established warming trends,
global and local, are likely to have a substantial and negative effect on the thermal comfort (Brown,
2011), health (Vanos, Warland, Gillespie et al, 2012), and well-being of many urban dwellers. The
impact of climate change in cities becomes more complex when air quality factors are added to
urban heat complexes: heat accumulation, sun/shadow and wind effects.
Is there a gap in how we understand the environment that our bodies are situated in and how we
mediate through? Hannah and Selin’s (2016) response to this question with their project ‘A Year
WIthout Winter’ which extends the understanding of climate beyond a scientific reliance on data
analysis and modelling to informing a collaborative narrative that accompanies the data. Offering
provocative visuals alongside a narrative that harnesses the scientific knowledge of climate change,
they seek to motivate ‘adequate political, economic and technological responses’. While some
reference the global concept of climate, they reference the ancient concept of ‘Klima’ and adopt the
language of agency whereby climate ‘refers to all the changes in the atmosphere which sensibly
affect our organs’ and influence ‘the feelings and mental conditions of men.’
1.3 Resilience: Survival and survivalism in urban uncertainty
“For social agents to act consistently and to take responsibility for their community, they need to
have reasonably well-founded expectations in the future.” (Hastrup, 2013)
The concepts of survival and survivalism conjure up images of Henry David Thoreau's cabin at
Walden Pond, stockpiling cans of baked beans and a certain level of solitude within the wilderness.
We aim to understand survival in urban settings, that are not in isolation of others. A recent article
published by CityLab looking at post-hurricane resilience surmised that levels of communal trust and
cohesion were critical predictors of survival. Aldrich (2018) argues for the investment in schemes to
encourage the building of ties and connections in communities (like Neighborfest in San Francisco) as
local social networks are of great importance to the durability and preservation of the affected
individual. How might we embed the link between survival, climate change and nature, in the
context of urban communities?
Survival in urbanity is a community priority and a way to make durable society (what Bruno Latour
argues is a responsibility of designers). The commons, as community, can be understood as an
action, as a way to do and continue doing. Maldonado in Design, Nature and Revolution: Toward a
Critical Ecology focused on the “human environment,” which he characterized as “one of the many
subsystems that compose the vast ecological system of nature” (Maldonado, 1972). Following a
JENNIFER CUNNINGHAM, SUE FAIRBURN
4
systems theory model, he claimed that among subsystems, “only ours possesses today the virtual
and real capacity of provoking substantial—that is irreversible—disturbances in the equilibrium of
other subsystems.” It is for these reasons that we will not understand the social or ecological as
separate systems, but instead consider from the synonymous perspectives of our 'human
environment’, the ‘socio-ecological’ and (as above) the Chthulucene.
The communication at play between these ecologies in relation to survival is necessary to consider.
Survival is rarely disassociated from nature and survivalism typically references both knowledge and
skills in how to co-exist with nature. Design has an increasing library of how-to-books and user-
manuals which aim to assist in navigating our constantly changing human environment. The
Extrapolation Factory's User Manual (Montgomery & Woebken 2016) opens up design future
practices for the people whereas the Augmented Ecology Fieldguide (2018) for the wired wilderness
(2018), employs drone ecology and satellite sensors on living systems to generate a visual expression
of the living landscape that extends our view, as a form of citizen science. Space literature similarly
contains how-to’s, as astronauts reflect on their time in space by approaching our daily life. Chris
Hadfield’s (2015) Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth tries to help us build our awareness to life on
earth, drawing experience to our everyday through reflections on survival and hope in space.
1.4 Hope: Anticipatory practices and implementing structures of care
Anticipation, as recognised by the geographer Ben Anderson (2010) is comprised by a series of styles,
logics and practices. Practices, as the most relevant to CAPE, are considerations of how futures are
made present through modes of affect, thought objects and materiality. Within anticipatory practice
Anderson [ibid] argues it can be broken down into one of three categories : calculating futures,
imagining futures or performing futures. We extend this further to communicating futures,
considering specifically how hope is a generative tactic with which to anticipate what may come.
Within this frame of hope we look to the everyday efforts of people in understanding and
anticipating nature, this includes climate modelling (Halstrup 2013), changes in urban snail
populations (Zhang, 2018), utilisation of pigeons to monitor air quality (Haraway, 2017),
development of specific vocabularies in the face of natural disasters (Widianto, 2018) and day-to-day
engagements with changing weather conditions.
We acknowledge that anticipation as practice, style and logic is an affective state of the present. It is
a lived condition shared by societies. This survivalist state draws together notions of collective
imagination and affect. By understanding imagination to be a knowledgeable condition, "a frame of
mind that prepares someone to do something" (DiBattista, 2017), it takes on an active, affective role
in the present. We consider affect and imagination from the perspective of the individual and
society. Marina Garcés (2012), in her article 'Honesty with the Real', writes about the notion of being
affective. Garcés demonstrates that letting go of one’s subjectivity facilitates understanding as a
body of people. How then does a citizen becomes affective within their city? Like Latour, Stengers
and Haraway we understand nature to be something that has to be done, or actively manipulated
from within. Therefore the affective actors, a system in themselves, act and respond with and within
the ecological system.
Citymapper (Figure 1), the app that structures multiple ways to reach a destination, has a section
where users can opt to be ‘rainsafe’ i.e. arrive at their destination as dry as is possible in the
circumstances. This is available even in times of extreme drought. Public transport becomes
protection. In a constant state of anticipation, this option is survivalist in nature. In this case the user
has the ability to ensure safe transit and the app does not have to respond to the weather. This
localised engagement with weather (which we understand to be a form of physical climate
Climate Anticipation. Working towards a design proposal for urban resilience and care
5
provocation) is a preventative technological development enabling users to decide how they want to
interact with the daily climate of their city. In the case of the ‘rainsafe’ option the sensing of the
surroundings is revoked from the individual, making the app ‘affective’ on behalf of people who wish
for protection, the routes mapped have elements of care and empathy.
Figure 1: Citymapper interface mapping multiple Rain Safe routes regardless of present weather (Credit: Citymapper).
We have taken a long time to understand how to position speculation in relation to CAPE when the
present quality of anticipation is so important to the system. Matt Ward argues that the speculative
trajectory that design has followed needs to change and redirect itself along a route of care (Ward,
2018). Critiques surrounding speculative design argue about the accessibility of this narrative to the
everyday person. Interventions of care are functional, sited, tangible and ongoing. Where speculative
design tends towards provocations, dialogues of care enable design to be accessible and mobile
through a humanitarian lens where locals take on an affective agency. In this frame people can be
more than bystanders of the ‘what-could-be’ and instead actors in their possible worlds. Through
hope, affect and care (all active forms of participation) CAPE can engage in localised settings by
working intently with the present moment.
JENNIFER CUNNINGHAM, SUE FAIRBURN
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1.5 Trust: Communicating through civic engagement and collective
imagination
“The imagination is not a privileged act; everyone engages in it. The imagination allows me to give a
credence and an integrity to any existence outside of myself.” Mary Ruefle (2017)
Forensic Architecture (FA) is an investigative practice which uses architecture as an optical device
when looking further into state violence and human rights violations. FA utilises data gathered
through new evidentiary methods that are both top-down as well as bottom-up (Forensic
Architecture, 2018). Bricolages of audio, visual and textual reflections are gathered from social media
platforms, satellite imagery, and materials sourced and leaked through hacks and recordings in order
to weave together a post-real-time narrative. Their practice oscillates between critical reflections and
calculated interventions, and serves as an exemplar of data-driven civic engagement and
communication. Of interest is their new forensis in which "civil society groups use a variety of
scientific and aesthetic means to co-produce and present evidence in the pursuit of public
accountability” [ibid]. Big data and fabulations piece together narratives that have occurred in order
to reveal the truth surrounding injustices within society.
In a recent interview Anab Jain, of speculative design studio Superflux, spoke of the importance of
imagination in relation to their work (Jain, 2018). This was not their own imagination but the
imagination of those confronted by their works, which query the entangled landscapes of
technology, culture, society and the environment. By materially articulating and probing collective
thought individuals have the opportunity to critically rethink the world we may live in by reclaiming
their imagination. This is the use of fiction and fabulation which we understand through Donna
Haraway and Matt Ward. In order to understand how CAPE nurtures this position it is best to outline
our developing methodology.
2. Methodology
CAPE builds upon the CAAS methodology, which is immersed in the broad field of Design Research. In
appearingly contrasted and extreme environments, CAAS sought insights arising from their overlap
and potential reciprocities, leading to potential hypotheses (Fairburn et al, 2017). CAAS and CAPE
align with Malika Bose's (2007) recognition of design processes as being similar to the critical analysis
undergone in scientific work, to pursue goal-oriented problem solving by furthering the research
question toward the theme and focus of the project.
Research through Design: taking design or case studies for research analysis,
Design through Research: taking research results as a basis for design oriented
outputs
CAPE methodology also assembles the ‘SF acronym’ of Donna Haraway as a conduit to consider the
hidden systems and intangible connections underpinning society and the environment in their
everyday. Just as the patterns ascertained by CAPE will be processed and felt in real-time they at
times malfunction, go off-course and in their anticipatory capacity imagine the possibles to come.
In this paper, we use case studies as snapshots of approaches, trialled and analysed in this time, to
foster place-making and to inform our thinking and doing; future materialisations. These case studies
allow CAPE to be understood through and significantly, with these material interventions as we
recognise the capacity of objects to generate contexts (Appadurai 2013).
Climate Anticipation. Working towards a design proposal for urban resilience and care
7
Figure 2: CAPE methodology visualised in progressive stages of design through research and research through design
(Credit: J Cunningham).
3. Case Studies
The four case studies presented progress in a scaled approach through human and non-human
approaches of engaging with our surrounding terrestrial and extra-terrestrial environments. The case
studies are materialisations of different facets of CAPE - how to capture surrounding data on air
quality in an urban context, how to collectively write in the SF acronym, how to remotely monitor
city wide air quality through combining Earth Observation technologies with Machine Learning and
how to navigate unfamiliar environments with a closed-loop wearable. Like the archetypal survival
handbooks, these how-to's act as guides for CAPE, so that we can further understand how-to
navigate in this socio-ecological situation.
Each case study progresses through considerations of preemption, preparation and mitigation.
Preemption allows us to consider the thinking and relevance behind each case study with regards to
CAPE. In referencing preparation each case study was analysed for its ‘doing’ capacity, what its
action is in the present and how it does so from within. Mitigation is included to convey the impact
of such interventions, who they benefit and how they can be applied in different contexts. We begin
on the ground with a citizen science workshop where participants built an air quality monitor, move
to the writing of collective fictions based off of the position of satellites in the sky, after which we
align urban streets and satellites with the work of an Indian space start-up using data analytics to
deliver social, economic and environmental intelligence and finish somewhere in lower earth orbit
exploring the suited human-in-the-loop as data conversations.
JENNIFER CUNNINGHAM, SUE FAIRBURN
8
3.1 Citizen Science: Who makes decisions about the air we breathe?
Preemption Luftdaten is an open source data platform that crowd-sources information for the
comparison of changes in environmental factors through a series of stationary self-built sensors (see
figure 3) which track and communicate real-time data about the surrounding environment. This
development began and continues as a Citizen Science project. They aim to make the data about our
surrounding environment such as temperature, relative humidity and air pollution visible and
accessible (without significant delay) to the wider public.
Figure 3: Luftdaten device camouflaged in an urban wilderness, enabling nature to aid in localising data collection and
understanding (Credit: J. Cunningham).
Preparation"Who makes decisions about the quality of air we breathe?" Controversial plans to erect
an incinerator in the Torry area of Aberdeen, Scotland led a local to ask this of a nearby
MakerSpace.
1
This provoked a response in the form of a DIY air quality workshop held June 2018 at a
local public library where we as citizens of the city made individual Air Quality Monitors. Although
collected data is available to witness on a global scale, it was clear that the individual wants behind
this hyper-localised data collection vary from person to person, emphasising the continued position
of Luftdaten within citizen science.
Mitigation Even though citizens cannot modify the placement of their sensor on the map there is the
capacity to programme the device to pick up incorrect signals, thus making the data and
corresponding visuals inaccurate. This device hacking if in areas with few air quality monitors could
affect people's perceptions of their surrounding environments and in some cases could be utilised as
a tactic to disempower action. The beneficial capacities of the Luftdaten network increase with
1
This emerged from a similar anxiety after realising the surrounding air quality in Stuttgart, Germany presented the highest levels of
Particulate Matter (PM) in Europe.
Climate Anticipation. Working towards a design proposal for urban resilience and care
9
quantity of devices. The question then arises - once the visualised data has been processed by an
individual, at what point do they act?
The current stationary aspect ties data to place and not person meaning it is complicated to
understand what the individual has experienced and inhaled over the course of a day. To personalise
the system Lufdaten wish to allow public entry and grading of symptoms common to areas with high
levels of PM and NO𝗑 suggesting the documentation of coughing, wheezing, sneezing and itchy eyes
as well as the "geographic mapping of symptom frequency and intensity". By overtly tying personal
health to the tracks of individuals the AQM becomes comparable to current health wearables
however with the critical difference that a shared map creates a collective knowledge of the
surroundings so that Luftdaten is for the people and not just for the person.
Themes: Sensemaking, communicating
3.2 Collective narratives: Maybe we should call it Chronotaph 23/7?
Preemption As part of the V&As programme of events with exhibition ‘The Future Starts Here’,
Satellogy: A map for Future Use was hosted by The Open Space Observatory (OSO). OSO is an
initiative for gatherings and infrastructure for the observations of satellites, spacecraft and space
junk (OSO, 2019). Satellites encircle our skies and critically support our infrastructure. In the
Satellogy workshop we developed methods to read the history behind satellites and wrote the first
collaborative speculative fiction for a growing wiki of satellite constellations.
Preparation As a group we were given a map of the night sky on 23 July 2018. The image laid the
positions of named satellites over constellations as well as outlining some key facts about the
satellites alongside (such as how it would be categorised, its owner, launch site and launch date).
These facts allowed us to draw connections between various satellites as well as recognise the
contradictions within them individually. As a group we looked further into the satellites on show and
historical constellations on show looking into specifics. Our aim was to create a myth surrounding the
satellite constellation we sketched, which we called Chronotaph 23/7.
Mitigation OSO through actively attempting to develop a method of writing a collective narrative
that invited research into temporal snapshots of the night sky enabled a group of strangers to
explore questions of history, ownership, placement and myth using space infrastructure to think
through. It was a test site for developing collective imagination. Different individual narratives fed
into a commons of communication which took the form of shapes, facts and reflections, all of which
built our temporal constellation. We created a wiki which will act as a repository of the satellite
constellations. There is no time pressure for their creation but encouragement that other people
host Sattelogy workshops to write more Speculative Fictions. There was a sheet of questions to
consider which gave the wiki its structure, allowing for a framework to be followed by those who
write SF.
Themes: Sensemaking, communicating, hope, trust
3.3 Monitoring: Can we be witnesses to climate change from space?
Preemption Humans are fragile creatures and we can only live in a very narrow defined
environment, within a precisely defined quality of air, and range of temperature. In the case of India,
where 1.3 Billion people reside, the urban air pollution quality indicators growth rate is alarming and
threatening survival. India has 14 of the top 20 most polluting cities in the world. A recent study
(Maji et al., 2016) revealed that air pollution was a significant contributor to 80,665 premature
deaths of adults aged over 30 years in Mumbai and Delhi in 2015.
JENNIFER CUNNINGHAM, SUE FAIRBURN
10
Preparation Air pollution has direct implications for public health and productivity, and the
particulate matter is visible (see figure 4). The most common air pollutants include COx, NOx, SO2,
ground-level ozone (O3), lead and particulate matter (PM10 and PM2.5). Primary data sources for air
pollution monitoring are fixed ground stations with automatic equipment at breathing height that
take readings every 15 minutes. Operating at the city and regional level, Earth Observation is an
approach involving predictive analytics models at various scales to relate and apply data on urban air
quality to habitability, agriculture, water security, renewable energy, and insurance. Use cases range
from estimating crop acreage, to mapping urban heat islands or tree cover for cities, and identifying
viable rooftops for solar power harvesting or rooftop horticulture.
Figure 4: Accumulated particulate matter on Delhi foliage in Khirkee village (Credit: S Fairburn).
Mitigation Initiatives like E2O (Earth to Orbit, 2018) are pushing the applications for Earth
Observation through a hybrid solution that uses composite satellite data from 3 different satellites -
INSAT-3D (Indian), MODIS (American), and Sentinel (European). The solution uses Machine Learning
(ML) on data from satellites combined with weather data to monitor particulate matter yielding high
resolution actionable intelligence on air quality. There is an urgent need for city level air pollution
monitoring and this is most likely to be achieved through a cloud of shared data from ground
stations, satellites and mobile devices including wearables and wardrobes.
keywords: reciprocities, sensemaking, resilience, communicating
Climate Anticipation. Working towards a design proposal for urban resilience and care
11
3.4 Inhabiting: Can spacesuits teach us about data conversations?
Preemption: Humans are fragile creatures and can only live in a very narrow defined environment of
air quality, atmospheric pressure and temperature. On venturing to space, they must don a
spacesuit; a tight-fitting biosphere, a microclimate, a mini-spaceship that replicates Earth conditions.
While different suits are designed to address the needs of different contexts (outside the vehicle,
surface activity, and microgravity) each suit houses a Portable Life Support System (PLSS) to sustain
the basic physiological needs as well as to monitor the status of their portable biosphere (figure 5).
Spacesuits house an extensive array of sensors to monitor the suit’s environment and the status of
the space human inhabiting the suit - thus they are an extreme wearable, a wardrobe for extremes.
Figure 5: A schematic diagram (top) shows the individual components of the Portable Life Support System (PLSS), Oxygen
Purge System (OPS) and the Remote Control Unit (RCU) (Credit: NASA, 2016)
Preparation: The spacesuit houses extensive telemetry that requires multiple levels of sense-making.
Below is an excerpt from the Apollo 11 mission Air-to-Ground voice transcription (GOSS NET 1)
(NASA, 1969) showing a communication exchange on temperature, between CC (Cap Com) and CMP
(Astronaut). The exchange involves literal, personal reports by CMP coupled with thermal data
(Spacecraft and Astronaut) available to CC. Feedback loops and monitoring (figure 5) add complexity
to the system but they are a step towards reciprocity in the system and they recognise the ‘human in
the loop’ (Watts and Vogel, 2016). From Apollo to Mars, Human space endeavors involve multiple
layers of communication and the mode is two-part; data and conversation.
07 05 55 52 CC 11, Houston. the medics at the next console report that the
shrew is one animal which can eat six times its own body
weight every 24 hours. This may be a satisfactory base line
JENNIFER CUNNINGHAM, SUE FAIRBURN
12
for your spaghetti calculations on Al Bean. Over.
07 05 56 11 CMP Okay. Thank you. That’s in work.
07 05 59 15 CMP Houston, Apollo 11. It was slightly colder in here last night
than it has been on any previous night. Does EECOMM notice
any change in his data or any explanation for that?
07 05 59 25 CC Roger. Stand by just a moment. We’ve got to check some
temperatures.
07 05 59 35 CMP Up until last night it was - if anything, a little on the warm
side at night. Last night it was on the chilly side.
07 05 59 43 CC Roger there. We’ll run down the temperatures for the 2
nights.
Mitigation: Imagine if we could understand data like a conversation. Those embarking on space
travel anticipate the level of telemetry, though sometimes invasive, required for their survival and
they trust in the stream of exchanges necessary to monitor their status and the microclimate of their
environment. Data monitoring is choreographed and continuous, and data collection is constantly
streamed, in situ and remotely to Mission Control (i.e. not public) to achieve a data conversation that
is essential to the living and working astronaut. Mission control constantly scan for anomalies and
they use data conversations and observations to detect changes, to issue warnings and to inform life-
sustaining actions.
keywords: reciprocities, sensemaking, resilience, trust and communicating
Each approach draws on sensemaking and communicating at different scales, through different
languages and with differing levels of engagement between human, data and environment. The
affective actors take the form of citizens, air quality monitors, satellites, astronauts, spacesuits and
Mission Control, which in ‘nonarrogant collaboration’, following Haraway (2016), are responsive and
responsible with and within our developing durable socio-ecological system. The progression of
preemption, preparation and mitigation will frame CAPE as it did the case studies.
4. Insights
4.1 Preemption
Like the case studies that help inform CAPE, we understand the system we are developing to be for
the people and not just the person, the community in this capacity can make a direct contribution to
shared, real-time research and knowledge. Just as with the Air Quality Monitor, the beneficial
capacities of the CAPE network will increase with quantity of users. However, the user in CAPE is
always active, as CAPE is always active. By tying itself to Citizen Science (case study 3.1) and the
building of collective narratives (case study 3.2), community and communication is central to its
materialisation and for the engagement of others in environmental questions and action (case study
3.3). Socio-ecological and technological systems are intertwined within CAPE and require processing
through a commons, in this case a mission control centre (case study 3.4). CAPE will join OSO (case
study 3.2) and Donna Haraway in writing collective SF, but aim to do so with those that the climate
will most notably affect in our immediate future.
By encouraging ways to make people aware of climate change in a preemptive way we talk about
what might come. These conversations consider our immediate future as well as the long-term effect
we are trying to preempt in order to survive what is coming. CAPE is a way of exchanging this
information in its immediacy, in its propinquity. Propinquity as nearness in time, association,
Climate Anticipation. Working towards a design proposal for urban resilience and care
13
relationship and space enables the closeness of association between citizens in urban centres to play
out through CAPE. Whether this exchange be visual, tactile or olfactory, CAPE is about wearing
information in a way that the passerby senses the exchange and understands what we have seen,
where we have been and hence, what we are moving into. Citizens wearing CAPE would have the
ability to choose the mode of sharing capable by their wardrobe. Discreet exchanges of data occur as
pedestrians move through crowds, as commuters struggle for room on a bus, as cyclists wait at
traffic lights. CAPE is comprised of a commons of gestures which act as wearable modes of exchange.
Figure 6: CAPE bricolage - a material conversation with our environment, a spacesuit for the chthulucene (Credit: J.
Cunningham).
The data-exchange of CAPE within its surrounding urban landscape is time-limited. Data is only valid
for seconds or minutes. This contrasts with our historical perspective on climate referencing
generations and centuries. CAPE is present and its resilience is in its immediacy and its capacity to
JENNIFER CUNNINGHAM, SUE FAIRBURN
14
forget in order to anticipate. CAPE is not a storage facility but a transmitter, communicating with
those who are proximate. CAPE is not only a climate resiliency but an exchanged resiliency. By
witnessing the range of environments that others have moved through, individuals can anticipate
how to prepare themselves. Safety may be navigated through different routes, methods of transport,
changes in plan, differences in wardrobe. The ultimate form of resiliency is life, it is survival. The
rapidity in changing weather conditions within urban centres will require degrees of anticipation as
weather forecast becomes too remote. CAPE is a narrative of the environment you have moved
through, in seeing it you immediately act. It communicates elements of localised information, just as
nature does, it reflects the local condition (Figure 6).
4.2 Preparation
“Cities are progressive centres for change - key to the war on climate change” (Candy, 2018)
CAPE as an ACTION We aim to use CAPE as a form of active engagement. Like a hybrid of the wiki
developed by OSO (Case Study 3.2), and the field guides developed for survival, CAPE will become its
own open-source how-to approach climate change. This will be built by remote communities through
a series of workshops. The activities of these sessions will be divided into three sections:
preparation, preservation and durability, of climate and the people. In its active state CAPE will invite
civic engagement that can be on an individual level as well as a means to connect with others in the
urban environment - it is a social, technological and natural network that introduces a different
rhythm of use. As a guide it will look to imbue natural and social systems with self-regulatory
mechanisms through the lens of survival. As a localised modular wearable system incorporating
gestural and natural coding languages to inform a expandable wiki of forms, the gestures of CAPE
could be proposed by the community, integrated upon; and then formally added to their language.
CAPE as a Framework Having evolved from CAAS (City As A Spaceship), CAPE is being used by
members of the CAAS collective in its application to a course offering at the school of art in Berlin
(Fall 2018/Spring 2019). Here CAPE is used as a provocation and a framework within a
multidisciplinary project on the design of spacesuits. In this application, it is a way of talking about
climate change, society and how we monitor and make sense of the environments we’re passing
through, but not requiring or yielding itself to a materialisation. In gathering and translating both
quantitative and qualitative data, it establishes a space for co-owned narratives. The ground-up and
top-down gathering methods have the capacity to be predictive, as apparel that reflects our
experience and relationship to the climates we inhabit. The circular visualisations shown in figure 7
are comprised of separate fragments of big and small data.
Climate Anticipation. Working towards a design proposal for urban resilience and care
15
Figure 7: CAPE as a series of gestures visualised on the ground, in the environment (Credit: J. Cunningham).
CAPE as a Studio CAPE and worn telemetry in design studio to bring awareness to how we sense the
environments in which we move. In this application, CAPE will be introduced in a means similar to
the Luftdaten workshops (Case study 3.1), as an introduction to citizen science through static
streetscape objects and dynamic wearables within a dense modern north american coastal city. The
locating of places of interest by citizen students, will lead them to identifying places of concern.
Figure 8: CAPE Framework, overlaying methodology with developments in the SF acronym and anticipatory ways of survival
through personal shelter and collective mapping (Credit: J. Cunningham).
JENNIFER CUNNINGHAM, SUE FAIRBURN
16
5. Conclusions (Mitigation)
If speculation is understood as being future focussed, the present-day applications invited by the
notion of anticipation are relevant to CAPE. Anticipation as an affective state can be understood to
be comprised of the triad of performance, calculation and imagination with our addition of
communication, all of which can be applied at various scales of understanding, With regards to CAPE
this encompasses the personal, civic commons, climate and data. Speculation, when used, follows
Donna Haraway’s pairings with fabulation and fiction whilst recognising how CAPE has a grounding in
science fact. By developing from the SF figure we consider the relationships surrounding and
emerging from anticipation - affect as a subjective state for the individuals in a commons, care as a
local way to consider the human, survival as a state of preparation and speculation as a critique of
the possible (figure 8). The abstract gestures of CAPE and CAAS map themselves across all aspects of
the framework.
CAPE as part of an ecosystem is now its own ecosystem as well, a system within systems change. Just
as citizens become affective within the environment, as our methodology calls for activity, and as
Haraway recognises the the need to be active and rework nature from within, CAPE in one of its
forms is an active, applied doing. CAPE is a doing, is a verb, is a way of engagement. Its active state
enabling it to be a generative part within Latour’s notion of a durable society, one which requires a
survivalist state of mind.
CAPE will always be located within a cross-species entanglement, where we recognise CAPE’s
position in the present complex socio-ecological problem has no determinable stopping point and
therefore requires persistence. As such the methodology and future materialisations of CAPE will
not be sticky or stuck, but we encourage them to develop and learn through each stage of their
enquiry.
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About the Authors:
Jennifer M Z Cunningham is a Materials Researcher and Writer with interests in
developing systems of care with and within design, anthropology and materials.
Sue Fairburn is Design Faculty and a Researcher with interests in positioning design
between the body and extreme environments.
Acknowledgements: We would like to thank the continued support of Barbara Imhof and
Susmita Mohanty, our CAAS co-pilots, without their thinking we would not have been able
to further develop CAPE.
