Using Digital Technologies to Enhance Local Ecologies
It is difficult to make the connection between a single light left on in a room and the ecological problems we are facing on a global scale.
This is a proposed project based in schools that enhances ecological thinking at a local level. The project will be based in a primary school; the main goal is to enable all pupils to feel collectively responsible for the school's impact on the local environment. This will hopefully equip them with a deeper understanding of their personal impact upon the global environment too. In the development of this project, if one outcome is the reduction in the school's carbon footprint then this is an added benefit.
The form that I envisage this project taking is a digital representation of the school's energy consumption. At the crudest level, the school building would be represented as a digital face within the existing virtual learning environment. It would smile when there is a reduction in energy consumption and frown when energy consumption is increased. This idea can be developed, for example so that each physical space within the school could be represented to show its energy efficiency. These digital representations could potentially become more complex as the project goes on allowing the school to be perceived as a complex dynamic ecology.
It is also hoped that this ethos of self-regulation and energy efficiency, optimised by technology visualisation could be instigated beyond the school and into wider communities, for example linking with other schools and other organisations.
Technical
This scheme will operate through a graphically represented and animated version of the school within the Virtual Learning Environment. So, a 3dimensional plan of the school is rendered, with the added element of energy use within it shown in real time. Similar on-line technologies are being used with Second Life and Habbo, where users can operate within a 3d space. These facilities are certainly not alien to school children who are far more computer literate than their teachers.
I’m using the possible use of The Watson or a similar technology, which is a type of equipment able to connect to and monitor the electricity supply, providing an electronic reading of it. If this data can be accessed and fed into a proprietary program within the VLE instead, this data can be mapped onto and perceived within the virtual representation of the school.
The Watson
The energy data needs to have some engagement with the users, taking into account that they are school children, this data is mapped as Tamagotchi style characters. Possibly, the children will create the creatures themselves, Moshi Monsters provides an example of this, it is an on-line community “where you can adopt your very own pet monster. Each one has a lively, unique personality that develops the more you play”. More recently, Spore, Creature Creators has a more sophisticated version.
The characters could be linked to a range of external data feeds, such as the electricity use in classrooms, or the heat leaking from windows. The Tamagotchi personifies such data with facial expressions and noises. If too many computers have been left on, the character goes red, or if the heating has not been turned off, the character shivers.
In this way, the data feeds could be conceptualised as the senses and neurones of the school itself, and the Tamagotchi image represents the “mood” of the school. Therefore, the pupils and teachers can visually and audibly perceive abstract statistical data as a “living” organism.
At a later date other inputs can be implemented into the system, such as food arriving into the school, or outputs such as rubbish which leave it, these could be tracked and viewed with simple visualisations. It will enrich the idea of the effect the individuals, or the collection of individual will have on the school because they can directly view the change of state of the school in the virtual representation. How these extra interactions combine and help to form equilibriums is yet to be explored.
Conclusion
The overall hope of this project is to add an extra emotional impetus for the children to become more aware of their surroundings and each other so that a richer sense of community and ecology can be fostered. It is also hoped that this ethos of self-regulation and energy efficiency, optimised by technology visualisation could be instigated beyond the school and into wider communities. In this way the gaps between the natural world and society which have been widened by traditional uses of technology are now re-linked as we are integrated and enmeshed into self organising community systems.