Sheep’s clothing is a design project that explores how visual aesthetics inform agricultural practices by examining the determinate nature of designed objects. With the growth of alternative agricultures (especially those ascribing to methods of urban foraging, illicit farming, and public cultivation), agriculturalists require new objects that aid in food production. Specifically looking at sensor technologies as applied to mushroom foraging, the project is founded on the hypothesis that the aesthetics of agricultural technology directly impacts cultivation through their perceived use, and designers are positioned to change farming techniques by rethinking aesthetics. Here technology is therefore approached visually. By employing modes of crypsis (a zoological term meaning an organisms ability to blend in with its environment), visual forms reify these new uses, and can change how and where agriculture takes place. The end product is a series of participatory design workshops in which sensor housings will be created to promote monitoring of urban mushroom growth.

Format:

Considering the typical form of a requirements document–a lengthy text document with minimal illustrative components that employs highly technical language–with regards to the potential participant groups at the 01SJ Biennial–ideally, a group of industrial designers; more realistically, a mixed group where designers are outnumbered by non-designers–a radical disconnect and potential for broad miscommunication seems apparent. While the initial claim for including a requirements document for Sheep’s Clothing was to appropriate a form and language comfortable to industrial designers to speed up the synthesis of information and concept, for persons other than the ideal participants, the document would fail to speed up anything (especially speculation about an unfamiliar topic). The most glaring issue is one of comprehension, where participants would be more focused on understanding the written text, thereby expending the majority of mental capital on a tangential task. This means that the initial requirements document must be changed to allow ease of access to all parties by lowering the threshold of comprehension, i.e. avoiding unfamiliar formats, lengthy texts, non-illustrative examples, and all-too-flexible interpretations. So, a more structured and explicit document is needed to focus the workshop(s).

As part of my process of thinking, I have been developing a set of visual aids–short texts with an image or diagram. These aids have tended to be provocative in order to evoke a certain range of responses that orbit around sensors, mushroom cultivation and foraging, and the urban environment. While initially envisioned as a means to generate draw people in to the exhibit (they can still function this way in fact), they are perfectly suited–in both form and content–to focus the process of speculation around sensing within the city. That is, the traditional requirements text document will be replaced by 20 to 30 image-based requirements. Save the obvious lack of specificity at times (as well as over-specificity at other times), the goal has never been to be completely accurate in thinking about speculative designs for hidden sensors. Instead, the idea has been to use speculative design approaches to foster conversations about how technology and small-scale agriculture can be integrated at a conceptual level, both in terms of function and value.

Areas:

A typical requirements document is product focused; this illustrative document will divide focus between the product itself, i.e. the sensor housing requirements, and the process of mushroom foraging and cultivation. Since the product is only a housing, the functionality will be fixed beforehand–moisture, light, pH, and temperature (which are derived from the purchased garden sensors). By limiting the features to design, the requirements document will focus specifically on the materiality (e.g. what the housing looks like, what aesthetics it employs, etc.) as related to the values of mushroom foraging (e.g. exploration, identification, secrecy, opportunism).

I. Introduction:

What constitutes ag-aesthetics, how ag-aesthetics and agricultural practices are linked (directionally), why ag-aesthetics misrepresents small-scale and alternative agricultures

II. Background on mushroom cultivation/foraging

What the process entails for either act (inoculation, fruiting); what are the limitations (sense-able such as moisture and light; not sense-able such as identification), factors (ecology of mycelium), concerns (e.g. remediation of soil); description of ideal environments (particular diversity)

III. Background of sensor devices

What has been made (prominently featuring EasyBloom, standard 3-way soil meter) and what they sense (not factors for mushrooms mainly) the notions about farming as a practice, as a production method that are lacking (value divide); focused largely on interaction design

IV. Requirements for new ag-aesthetics

Primarily composed of images of sensors in the urban environment paired with jarring value judgments of foraging; secondarily composed of urban foraging as a sustainable and integrated act (again divide between the two areas); lastly composed of future ecologies

Sheep’s clothing is a project that explores how visual aesthetics inform agricultural practices by examining the determinate nature of designed objects. With the growth of alternative agricultures (especially those ascribing to methods of urban foraging, illicit farming, and public cultivation), growers require new objects that aid in food production. Although the current options suffice in a functional manner–i.e. they are able to accomplish a necessary task–they embed conservative notions of agriculture, therefore failing to encourage non-traditional and evolving practices. Sheep’s clothing locates the failure of current technologies in the failure of perceived use (affordances).

Specifically looking at sensor technologies, the project is founded on the hypothesis that the aesthetics of ag-tech directly impacts cultivation, and designers are positioned to change techniques by adjusting aesthetics. Technology is therefore approached visually, and the project aims to invent new protocol of design. Just as sensors for backyard gardens are designed to blend in with personal space, new devices need to be designed to blend in with public and urban space. By employing modes of crypsis (a zoological term meaning an organisms ability to blend in with its environment), visual forms reify potential uses, and can change how and where agriculture takes place.

In the workshop, a group of industrial and interaction designers will view a short documentary outlining the process of mushroom growing (15-30 minutes). The video will show the resources, products, and processes that are needed to grow mushrooms successfully. The designers will then be presented with a requirement document and a presentation of potential uses for a product. In the second hour, the participants will be asked to venture out into the city to take pictures depicting uses of the fictional product. In the third hour, each designer will propose and diagram a series of three housings tackling the issues discussed and information procured about urban farming and mushroom growing.

The documentation of the project will include three parts. First, a visual campaign explaining the hypothesis of the project. This will include a short video about growing mushrooms, posters and projected images, and a requirements document. Second, the raw designs and background research of the participants (as well as some those generated beforehand) will be displayed. Third, the designs will be rendered into use-case videos that explain how the designs may function.

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Sheep’s clothing examines the relationship amongst aesthetic practices, cultivation techniques, and interaction design. The project is founded on the hypothesis that the aesthetics of ag-tech directly impacts cultivation, and designers are positioned to change techniques by adjusting aesthetics.

Sheep’s clothing examines the relationship amongst aesthetic practices, cultivation techniques, and interaction design. With the growth of alternative agricultures (especially those involving urban foraging and illicit farming), small-scale farmers require secure, distributed, and covert methods of monitoring of plots. The current options for such farmers embed antiquated notions of small-scale, and rely on visual forms more appropriate for backyard gardens than for urban space. Simply adapting these forms limits potential uses as the devices engender particular practices by virtue of their original form.

The difficulty becomes finding the proper palette for designs. By employing modes of crypsis (a zoological term meaning an organisms ability to blend in with its environment), visual forms can reify potential uses. The project answers the hypothesis that the aesthetics of ag-tech directly impacts cultivation by positioning designers to change techniques through adjusting aesthetics. Sheep’s clothing consists of twenty (20) camouflaged housings, each depicted within its ideal environment, as well as the designs and renderings completed in a workshop.

In the workshop, a group of industrial and interaction designers will view a short documentary outlining the process of mushroom growing (15-30 minutes). The video will show the resources, products, and processes that are needed to grow mushrooms successfully. The designers will then be presented with a requirement document and a presentation of potential uses for a product. In the second hour, the participants will be asked to venture out into the city to take pictures depicting uses of the fictional product. In the third hour, each designer will propose and diagram a series of three housings tackling the issues discussed and information procured about urban farming and mushroom growing.

The documentation will include the designs of the participants, as well as those generated beforehand, combining the native resources and concerns of the cities of San Jose and Atlanta.

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Sheep’s clothing examines the relationship amongst aesthetic practices, cultivation techniques, and interaction design. The project is founded on the hypothesis that the aesthetics of ag-tech directly impacts cultivation, and designers are positioned to change techniques by adjusting aesthetics.

Requirement documents [...] are typically written documents[s] describing the technical and functional requirements of a system. [They] tend to be more focused on written description and less on visual illustration–they are more tell and less show. The lack of visual simulation often leads to misinterpretation of a requirement. Screen shots can be included to help reduce this misinterpretation, but static screens only go so far.¹

In terms of collaboration between graphic designers, programmers, project managers, and the other various actors in creating a product, a requirement document falls short (Todd Zaki Warfel makes the continued claim that so too do wireframes). The insufficiency stems from the limitations of representation and designed purpose. The requirement document is produced to enumerate concerns rather than answer them, and does so in an unobtrusive qua indefinite manner. A prototype, on the other hand, fills in the gaps that the requirement documents (and wireframes) fail to capture by demarcating the boundaries explicitly.

To some extent, the requirement document is purposefully vague. As Seymour Chatman explains with regards to movies and novels,² the ability of a written text to remain vague and a visual text to demand specificity results from the inherent modes of signification. A written signifier exhibits a one-to-many relationship–the written statement “Helen of Troy is the most beautiful woman ever” allows people fill in the qualities satisfy this claim. A visual signifier (especially that of a movie or prototype) exhibits a one-to-few or one-to-one relationship–the image of a woman playing Helen of Troy fixes qualities of beauty, thereby resulting in judgment of whether she is, in fact, the most beautiful woman. For the requirement document and prototype, the transmutable relationship benefits designers, who can interpret and generate new expectations.

While Zaki Warfel makes the requirement document’s imprecision out to be a bad thing, for my purposes it is wonderful. The Sheep’s Clothing workshop aims to inspire industrial designers to think outside the typical modes of representation. To create a completely new functional and aesthetic housing for a sensor, one must not be presented with a blueprint that limits confusion, but instead encourages multiple interpretation. Overdetermined documents would only result in similar (i.e. non-inventive) housings. Moreover, industrial designers have been trained to read such documents, added to the worth of such a loose representational mode.³

In the first hour of the workshop, the industrial designers will be presented with a short (15-30 minute) video/presentation about the client–urban and covert mushroom growers/foragers. The next 30-45 minutes will be spend looking at a requirement document that outlines both the technical components of the EasyBloom and the practical concerns of covert farming. Before each participant/group heads out to explore the city, a detailed slug (a physical requirement document) of the internal components will be given out to provide some sense of scale, potential, and material connection.

1. Zaki Warfel, Todd. Prototyping. (Brooklyn: Rosenfeld Media, 2007.), 5-6.; emphasis added [↩]
2. Seymour Chatman. “What Novels Can Do That Films Can’t (And Vice Versa).” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 7, No. 1, On Narrative (Autumn, 1980), 121-140. [↩]
3. two example document templates: a software requirement document and a functional requirement document [↩]

Embedded within the many facets of a technology are certain assumptions about its relational nature, or relationality.¹ To specify, technologies engender use according to a much more complicated set of constraints than simply direct utility. While it is often a classic causality dilemma–did the practice direct the form; or the form, the practice?–the object and its implementation exist as part of a reflexive network.² The laptop computer provides fine example. Once marketed as an introduction to computing³ and as a desktop companion, the laptop now functions, for many, as a primary resource. The shift toward primacy is emblematic of an ever-growing and increasingly transitory relationship amongst location, work, and information.⁴ Likewise, the aesthetization of laptop⁵ demonstrates how computers have become status symbols–created to be seen being used rather than simply created to be used. In either case, its form and function are driven by its relation to expansive, non-technological concerns, notions, and aims.

Agricultural technologies⁶ similarly rely on a expansive network of relations within, outside, and between of the fields of agriculture and technology. In particular, the inquiry here explores how small-scale ag-tech reflects, impacts, and influences particular practices of urban farming and gardening. The underlying hypothesis is that the subset of sensing and robotics ag-tech have largely failed urban agriculture due to, in part, the farming practice such technologies assume visually and interactively.

The major failure of such ag-tech is a failure of imaginative support. Agriculture as a physical practice does not exist in a cultural vacuum–it is informed largely by agriculture as a visual, philosophic, and fictional practice. The imagined Farmer–closely tied to Thomas Jefferson’s concept of the Yeoman–is expressed in two major fictions. On one hand, sensing and robotics have (successfully) assumed farms are large, industrial, single-crop producers. While the act itself differs from the isolated yeoman, the industrial farmer hearkens to how farmers are viewed as national scaffolding. The technology makes this obvious: the robotic vine trimmer is designed to move down single-track rows and has a lengthy set-up time, indicating that the technology aims at being efficient, productive, and durable. On the other hand, sensing and robotics have (with mild success) assumed gardens/small farms are private, closed, personal plots for individuals or small families supporting a variety of growth. Closer to Jefferson’s idea, the yeoman is self-sufficient. Again, the technology exhibits this: the EasyBloom (pictured above) presents a technology that is flexible, customizable, and accessible to be unobtrusive in the smallest garden and under the most diverse conditions.

The problem is simply not scale or cost in either scenario. The vine trimming technology can certainly be housed (imaginatively) within something one person may be able to set up, as much as the EasyBloom can become a much more singular and large-scale operation. The barrier becomes the imagined use based its visual presentation.

Consider the advertising and promotional images of the EasyBloom. Depicted in a multi-crop garden, the EasyBloom becomes a pillar of Americana–privy to the interior space of the white-picketed fence American Dream. Similarly, the explanatory diagrams appeal to a finite concept of gardening–done by a single person in his/her backyard to provide immediately and insubstantially to meals. The previously mentioned cartoon image shows two carrots, two radishes, a small tomato plant, lemon tree, and flowers (possibly pansies) being monitored by the EasyBloom. The other images place the device in ornamental flower gardens. The images position the device, and more broadly, gardening as symptoms of the post-industrial notions of leisure (the 24-hour day divided into three 8-hour blocks: work, recreation, and rest) and personal space. The small-scale garden is only for pleasure, and maintained only before or after work (reinforced by the business suit sleeves barely show in the third and fifth images). Moreover, gardening as a practice is executed within the temporal barrier of recreation and the spatial barrier of the personal yard.

While successful in creating a myth, these visual campaigns neglect different breeds of farming and gardening, especially the fledgling practices of illicit gardening and urban foraging.⁷ In thinking about these alternate modes of practice, it begs the question:

How might sensing and robotics technologies represent different notions of agriculture through embedded material assumptions?

and,

How might technology change technological practice by relying on alternative mythologies?

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Sheep’s clothing delves into the systemic factors underlying covert urban farming by exploring forms of crypsis (a zoological term meaning the ability of an organism to blend with its environment) for sensors. With the rise of illicit farming within the cityscape, farmers require more secure methods of monitoring the growing conditions of current and future urban plots, resources, and conditions. Sensors, such as the EasyBloom, rely on antiquated notions of farming, appealing to aesthetics designed for the personal backyard plot. Simply hiding these inappropriately designed sensors from view limits the potential regions of information collection and negates farming as a sustainable practice. Crypsis, on the other hand, disguises use as much as the object itself. Housings disguised as a functioning trash receptacles could monitor the potential of refuse as fertilizer to allow the sensed data and act of sensing security from interruption and seizure. Sheep’s clothing consists of twenty (20) camouflaged housings, each depicted within its ideal environment. Focusing on the agricultural needs of mushrooms, the project questions how data, agriculture, and everyday practices can be integrated into sustainable and symbiotic relationships.

In the workshop, a group of industrial designers will view a short documentary video diagramming the process of mushroom growing (hour one). The video will show the resources, products, and processes that are needed to grow mushrooms successfully. The designers will then be asked to venture out into the city to take pictures and collect data using a modified EasyBloom (hour two). In the third hour, each designer will propose and diagram a series of three housings tackling the issues discussed and information procured about urban farming and mushroom growing.

The documentation will include the designs of the participants, as well as those generated beforehand, combining the native resources and concerns of the cities of San Jose and Atlanta.

1. In previous writing, I have focused on the term relatedness. Relationality is different than relatedness in that relatedness constitutes an internal, closed, and expressed set of relations, and relationality constitutes the external ability of an object to generate relations, i.e. external, open, and expressing. That is, where relatedness is a set adjective– qualifying how seemingly discrete parts form a cohesive whole–relationality is a part noun–situating an object within an actor-network. [↩]
2. Despite what proponents of Bauhaus might claim, form and use cannot singularly determine one another. The Bauhaus chess set by Josef Hartwig attempts just this. The shape and use are created to be direct analogs within the checkered board. The problem–seen most readily with the pawns–is that outside the context of the board the pawns look no different from cubic building blocks. The form, therefore, do not simply indicate use; so too does the board, the rule set, the cultural philosophy of Bauhaus, and, to a great extent, the setting (the linked image shows the set in the MoMA, where it is less a chess set to be used, but visual art to be understood). [↩]
3. A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages; Alan Kay – 1972 (PDF), found http://thinkubator.ccsp.sfu.ca/Dynabook/ [↩]
4. something that can certainly be traced to the ubiquity of the internet, and new innovations such as cloud computing [↩]
5. While many of the visual appeals of, say, an Apple, are hopelessly grounded in function–a sleek minimalist aluminum body for durability–these features typically exceed most people’s needs, especially considering the Fabergé-like mystique with which many people treat these durable bodies. [↩]
6. which I call ag-tech, includes an expansive array of gardening technologies, industrial farming equipment, home sensor nets, etc. [↩]
7. for examples, see Remote Deployment and Monitoring of Illicit Urban Agriculture, a related project by Thomas Pinkney Barnwell, and UnMapping by Beth Schechter [↩]

Parasitic gardening reconsiders the available resources for urban gardens. As more gardens move within city limits, the nature of gardening needs to fundamentally shift away from legacy traditions. Until now, most urban gardens have relied on the “terra form model”–plots that recreate conditions of traditional, non-urban gardens. This model ignores the new environment of gardening, and so the new environmental resources. Parasitic gardening answers the question “What are the resources native to the urban landscape?” by analyzing sensed data to find non-traditional types of topsoil, fertilizer, and pest control. Additionally, the project develops methods of converting non-ideal resources into viable alternatives through a series of mechanical and robotic devices.