In this short presentation, I'm going to discuss an approach
that we have created for designing future personas in the
form of characters that we call Sciberpunks. They were born from
an idea what if we could augment humans to feel data? What would
the experience be like and how might it change our relationship
to the environment and to each other. As such a Sciberpunk is
an augmented human, with the ability to act as a voice to the
environment and its non human inhabitants by feeling and
expressing data related to them, such as having the ability to
taste pollution, data, smell, the destruction of habitats, and
perhaps to communicate it through doing tattoos on the
skin.
Urbanization and lack of green spaces and cities can lead to
biophobia, which in turn may affect how people engage in
sustainable design scenarios. We propose that the act of engaging
with environmental data for the purpose of building future
personas or Sciberpunks may in itself support building or
rebuilding environmental empathy if supported appropriately. For
this, we utilize arts-based methods. The aim is to create
new approaches to encourage empathy towards more than human
perspectives, for example, within urban design scenarios.
To build our Sciberpunks we collected data and other types
of information about an area called Linnaistensuo, which is a
natural swamp area within a Finnish city. The original aim
was to co-design Sciberpunks in face to face workshops in the
same city, and to build upon a proposed project called
Cyberpunk 2085 that develops characters but without the
augmentations for receiving and communicating data. The original
Sciberpunk created a number of sketches, videos, props and
costumes that could have been adapted, but due to COVID, we
moved everything online, and also included some data and
activities about the ongoing Corona situation. We curated the
datasets to make them easier to read and then created a number
of activities, each of which contributed to further
development of the Sciberpunk characters. Via the activities,
participants produced stories, poetry, sketches and
photographs. Activities encouraged them to embody data
and to roleplay their developing characters. We used an
overarching narrative to put the activities into context, which
followed three main characters, a raven and two swamp dwelling
creatures called suomuijat who were arguing. The Raven's role
was to ask participants to help to mediate the arguments using
data as evidence. Our journey begins in the heart of
Linnaistensuo where shadow and light are born from the swamp.
One day a big black Raven called Etiäinen is flying towards them
landing on their shoulders asking, do you know about the
future? Can you please tell me what will the future look like?
For the first time in their entire life, shadow and light
are arguing they cannot agree about the future. Raven Etiäinen
then decides to help them, advising them to see what
evidence they can find to support their arguments. The
narrative moved from the past where participants imagines and
sketched out the suomuijat characters who were living in
Linnaistensuo towards the future where these characters are
devolved into Sciberpunks with the augmentations and
superpowers needed for living in that time. Five youth education
students took part in the project, everyone worked on
their own at home due to COVID but shared and communicated
through WhatsApp group and also online zoom sessions. We sent
care packs to the participants which included art supplies and
also seeds to grow to relate with the theme of nature
connections. Our main results to share here relate to the
evidence of empathy building and engagement with the persona
building activities. We found evidence of empathy towards
nature expressed as sadness at the impact of human activity and
also emotions related to COVID such as disgust at the careless
practices of humans that led to the situation and fear of what
will happen next. To mitigate against such fears, participants
bestowed upon their future personas the abilities to sense
each other's needs, having precognition of danger and being
able to sense when nature is in pain. In the WhatsApp group, we
noticed the participants enjoyed to talk about and share photos
and artworks relating to nature, as well as following progress on
growing seeds. Over half the overall conversations was on
this theme, and unrelated to the actual Sciberpunk activities. In
the end, participants produced five distinct Sciberpunk
characters. Examples included warmonk, a shaman character who
communicates with plants and trees using his staff. The staff
keeps his mind and body connected to nature. Also swamp
fairy who has a crown to listen to what nature is whispering.
Over all these art-based method workshop activities achieved the
aim of leading to the creation of personas that were at a
minimum informed by real data sets. They were atypical in
terms of representing more than human characters. These personas
have strong connections to nature, yet such instructions
are not given directly as part of the activities. We believe
that such personas can play an important role in emphasizing
non human and environmental concerns.