AWEN – An inspiring project and an inspiration for change
A Walk Encountering Nature (AWEN) is a new data-driven mobile experience co-created by scientists, artists, designers and engineers, with the intention of making the climate crisis tangible on a personal level. By Matjaz Vidmar.
AWEN is a multi-layered journey – both the one we invite our audience on, as well as the one we took to design it. The core proposition behind it is to use data-driven mobile experiences as a bridge to deliver novel and engaging cultural content in post-Covid-19 times, as well as encourage impactful encounters with the most significant global challenge today – the climate emergency. It has been closely co-created by scientists, artists, designers and engineers, together reflecting on this vitally important theme.
AWEN centres on our observation that despite widespread awareness of both the global environmental crisis as well as the individual and collective change of behaviour we need to urgently implement, many are still not motivated enough to act. It seems that a local interpretation of global scientific data and modelling, vital for inspiring meaningful action, is difficult to achieve. Negative impacts of the climate crisis are not often immediately present on a personal level and day-to-day basis.
Hence, working between the Edinburgh Futures Institute (The University of Edinburgh) and the Edinburgh Science Festival, we deployed a structured Open Prototyping approach to combine expertise from digital arts and design, environmental science and public engagement. For us, this was both a research project and a personal contribution to help co-shape the future of these fields and our world – combining exploration of new technologies and creative futures design.
In particular, we mapped out how the global (data) perspectives on our planet require grounding in the immediacy of people’s everyday life in order to (re)establish the bonds of care and stewardship for our surroundings. With the 2021 Edinburgh Science Festival particularly looking to deploy ambulatory experiences to engage dispersed and asynchronous audiences, a “climate walk” was a core creative idea from early on.
Grounding our mission within the New Real programme also highlighted the significant potential of emerging technologies to address the issue of personalisation. As developed through the Experiential AI (Artificial Intelligence) research theme, we were set to explore the transformative potential of machine learning algorithms to tailor the participants’ walks to their locations and interests. We hypothesise that these new technologies can make intimate, personalised experiences deploy at a truly massive scale.
The Open Prototyping design canvas for the first phases of the development of AWEN
Though only a small part of our vision could be implemented as part of the pilot project on a super-short timescale (we had less than three months to design and another three months to build the experience), the seamless blending of self-guided prompts with their location-driven delivery ensures that every single walk is entirely unique and that the AWEN journey can be taken multiple times. Thus, thousands of individual journeys make a communal, singular, evolving event and a powerful signal about our collective desires and concerns.
The website-based application (accessible on any mobile phone or tablet browser) is using the device’s GPS coordinates to initiate and track your exploration of your local environment. Using satellite data, both the direction of your walk and the content of some of the interactions are uniquely shaped for where you are at the time. This is mindful not only of the global relevance but also, as far as possible, universally accessible.
This also makes the experience scalable – though there are many improvements we would like to implement along the way. In addition, in the spirit of collaborative innovation, we invite our audience to help us shape the future of the experience by providing feedback and comments, as well as content – we plan to use individual GPS traces of each walk to build a collective data sculpture as a unique call to action to tackle the pressures we heap on our environment.
As such, we really hope this walk will inspire you to look at your surroundings in a new light. In fact, the word ‘awen’ has Celtic origins and is often used to describe (poetic) inspiration as well as symbolic intertwining of earth, air and water. The walk mimics this unity by exploring the interconnections between green carbon taken out of the air and built up in plants, the polluting black carbon left behind by engine exhaust, and the blue carbon – the neglected role the oceans play in sequestering and storing vast amounts of CO₂.
The experience development is driven by science, arts, design and engineering. Though the format is a fun walk-game – produced by conceptual artist Inés Cámara Leret, sound designer Tom deMajo and interaction designer Brendan McCarthy – the very serious nature of the scientific findings and gentle nudges towards individual and collective adaption and behavioural change make this a critical contemporary experience. Our intention is not to educate, but to connect and empower people to step out of preconceptions and take on new perspectives and new actions.
Our hope is that our audience is going to find resonance with the experience and the messages within, which we also plan to share as part of the global COP26 climate conference in Autumn 2021. The pilot launched on 3 June is thus only the first step in the longer journey we invite you on.
The AWEN experience is the outcome of Experience in the New Real project, made possible by Scottish Funding Council Covid-19 Recovery funding to the University of Edinburgh’s Data-Driven Innovation initiative.
Visit awen.earth to embark on an AWEN journey and find out more about the project and its creators
