A group of us recently applied for EU funding for a project, to, basically, bring water into the metaverse. Here’s the TL;DR of what the project is trying to do, should we be successful. Update: we made it through to the final round. We will know if we were successful in July 2025. I’ve updated the abstract to reflect the improvements we did in round 2.
So yes, waaaayyy too early to celebrate. However, the process to get words on paper that says exactly what we want to do, and then getting consortium partners together who understood that, and felt equally passionate, and then contribute their perspectives in dazzlingly complementary ways was so inspiring, that I am chalking it up as a success now already.
So, for posterity, here is our abstract, and maybe some other bits that is particularly awesome. My primary intention for this project is to get funding to build the proof of concept tool – the digital twin (which we really see as a interoperable metaverse component). My secondary intention is for this project to serve as the first of two case studies for my Post-Doc. (Which I hopefully get funding for before I basically do all the research on the side, anyway.) If on the wild chance this interests you and you want to throw some money at us to get the proof of concept into existence sooner, then, please reach out!
The Swedish partners also had to submit a public science abstract which turned out neat:
AquaSavvy: short and sweet
AquaSavvy is an exciting project that merges data science, urban planning, and community creativity to revolutionize urban water management. It creates an interactive, web-based digital twin—a virtual model of city water flows—that makes water systems clear and engaging for everyone, from planners to residents. This visual tool acts as a bridge, connecting diverse groups to co-create water-sensitive urban designs, enabling faster, local solutions compared to traditional, decades-long city projects.
The project kicks off with Living Labs in Orø, Denmark, and along the Nilüfer stream in Bursa, Türkiye, where communities, researchers, and officials collaborate on solutions. Marcus Adolphson from KTH Royal Institute of Technology advises both sites, using scenario-planning expertise to ensure the tool adapts to future needs and fits into city planning. Lessons from these Labs will refine the tool for global use, empowering people everywhere to apply it independently. This reflects an innovative co-development showing a people-centric approach to technical development.
AquaSavvy’s core is a flexible platform led by Kim Nevelsteen at Root Interface AB, who researches and develops the IPSME ecosystem to advance the Industry of Integrations (IOI) to seamlessly combine diverse data systems for visualizations. This means an open, hackable platform where anyone can remix water data into creative tools, turning city water flows into a playground for innovation – allowing blending real-world water data into virtual worlds, simulations, or games.
Mengjie Han from Dalarna University develops an AI module for the tool, acting as a digital guide that answers water-related questions and aids decision-making. Compared to traditional visualization tools, AquaSavvy’s AI-driven enhancement will lead to a substantial leap forward in accurate water knowledge extraction and interactive user experience.
To spread AquaSavvy worldwide, the tool will be tested in virtual community labs in Portugal and Sweden, guided by Adolphson’s scenario methods. A global competition will invite everyone to explore and use the tool, igniting curiosity and collaboration. AquaSavvy empowers communities to reimagine urban water systems, building sustainable, inclusive cities together.
Longer abstract:
Problem: Water infrastructure is invisible.
A central challenge with the modern water system is that it is mostly invisible. Not only are water infrastructures physically hidden, but water management is also stabilised as a backdrop of modern practices, rendering the connection between water and urban planning and design invisible until there is a crisis. Mapping water infrastructures are complex, interrelated, and interpreted differently by different actors. Water has dynamic, multi-factor water-quality indicators. This project concerns the potential of visualisation to highlight and explore these challenges through incorporating a water-focused lens into digital twins.
Bring water sensitive urban design into digital twins of cities, creating a visual canvas tool through and for participatory planning perspectives.
AquaSavvy is a transdisciplinary project involving systems-of-systems data engineering, urban resource flows and participatory planning. The project is expected to last for 3 years. We will create a visual, interactive, web-based tool supported by local community-driven data platforms showing the different water flows that exist in an urban context in the form of a digital twin. The visual tool acts as a boundary object, to facilitate actors from different sectors to connect and relate to each other with regards to water issues, and facilitate decision-making and increased agency of the actors as a result. Through this “bridge-building”, the tool aims to allow conversations and ultimately interventions between various stakeholders, including the wider public, with regards to how water sensitive urban
design is implemented, making possible interventions at much more local scales and much shorter time-frames than the conventional decades-long urban transformations.
The project is implemented through co-design of participatory planning approaches through Living Labs in the case study areas of Orø, Denmark, and around the Nilüfer stream in Bursa, Türkiye. Lessons learnt from the Living Labs are then applied to the development of the platform that supports the tool to be used in a global, unassisted context, through the incorporation of an AI assistant module. This global use is tested first through virtual community labs in Portugal and Sweden, and then globally through the use of a competition.
Technically, the project concerns obtaining data from diverse sources, forming an interoperable system of systems platform which allows translating the data to a usable form, enabling different visualisations into the tool. An AI module will also be developed to provide contextually relevant responses to users’ queries.
This project departs from conventional digital twin creation in three key ways.
Innovation: 1. Process-oriented data approach
Firstly, rather than assuming data availability, the transdisciplinary process of how to obtain the required data from the stakeholders’ perspectives is investigated: Which kind of data (knowledge, practices, values etc. ) can be used to represent local perspectives? Which methods can be used to bring forward ‘invisible’ data, like the emotions a place evokes in people?
2. More human-centric use case of digital twins
Secondly, the use case of this digital twin concept is human-centred rather than technocentric. This shift alters the perspective from solely considering aspects of risks and technical infrastructure to also encompass nature, human, and spatial aspects relating to synergy and integration with urban design and development. The project and its associated visual tool are intended to incorporate non-traditional knowledge alliances, and as such is envisioned at a different level of technical detail than is typically considered in professional GIS applications. It is more similar to a game world, in that it is intended to be curated, emergent, open-ended and not photo-realistic.
3. More efficient and dynamic data integration
Thirdly, the technical aspect of integrating the data is also innovative through its use of a systems-of-systems integration approach. Data sources are integrated through the Evolutionary Architecture described by IPSME, which stands out for its integration of disparate systems without requiring uniform protocols, thereby supporting system dynamism and simplifying integration.
Other stuff:
Why I want to bring water into the metaverse:
In such dynamic and fragmented environments (really, here we are talking about the environment, late capitalism, and the current political realities) it becomes crucial to experiment with new professional and democratic dialogue tools that can operate within the complexities, controversies and uncertainties present in late modern societies, … Visualising and enabling such dynamic experimentation has up to recently been technically difficult (Hadjimichael et al 2024, Langenheim et al 2022). The emergence of Digital Twins of cities provides a potential way to facilitate this experimentation, coupled with the emerging concept of the Metaverse and its focus on interoperability (Yang et al., 2024).
A digital twin is typically a technically bounded, visual representation of a model or simulation of a city or industrial installation, excluding the inputs and consequences of the chosen model. There are two challenges with current approaches to these visual models; the “walled garden” approaches by individual companies focused on optimising their systems for a specific goal, that makes it hard for other actors to use the products or platforms for other purposes, and secondly the techno-centric approach of the city simulations and their visualisations.
In this project we challenge both of these aspects, firstly from a technical perspective through the Industry of Integrations (IOI) approach, producing a prototype alternative platform, while facilitating local knowledge and climate change preparedness (Brennan et al., 2022) through the staging of new participatory planning approaches through the use and co-development of the visualisation tool.
Industry of Integrations (IOI)
Given the massive amount of interoperability required to model, analyse and manage water systems, the task of providing interoperability should be shifted from individual companies or governments to serve the larger community in general. Centralised systems typical of companies and increasingly true for governments, tend to internalise their operations and focus on optimizing their own system (typically for a profit or KPI incentive), rather than the interoperability of their product. Further, few have incorporated other resource streams especially in open access or interoperable formats. In this project we illustrate how to provide an interoperable system, through an approach called the Industry of Integrations (IOI).
The movement for the creation of an Industry of Integrations (IOI) was designed in the context of integrating virtual worlds. IOI aims to transform gaming by, rather than waiting for corporations to integrate their virtual worlds, establish a player-driven ecosystem, where anyone with API knowledge of a system can build and monetize their integrations, bridging diverse platforms and dissolving sandbox boundaries. IOI shifts interoperability from corporate control to communities, fostering a grassroots industry of user-generated content (UGC) integrations that amplify creativity across gaming landscapes. IOI’s decentralized approach empowers players, modders, and small developers to connect UGC-supporting systems—linking characters, assets, or tools across games. This drives inclusivity, digital transformation, and sustainable innovation in gaming culture.
In a similar way, an industry of integrations is applicable to both water related Open Data
Infrastructures (ODIs) and Collaborative Data Platforms (CDPs). For ODIs, this would be at high levels, or knowledge infrastructures more broadly, and for CDPs, at more local levels e.g., through civic technoscience (Kasperowski and Kullenberg 2019). The combination of IOI and civic technoscience enables a citizen-driven ecosystem where people can build integrations, bridging scientific databases between different disciplines, and more innovatively bridge scientific databases and game platforms, allowing the incorporation of physical world elements into virtual environments, be they serious games, casual games, virtual worlds or simulations.
By implementing the required software infrastructure and pushing for an industry of integrations related to science, it is possible to bridge science and creativity, dissolving the boundaries between laypeople and experts, and building new knowledge alliances. This is what we understand as the Metaverse.
Actor-centric approach to digital twins
While the concept of virtual worlds and digital twins are easily conflated with the concept of the Metaverse, the idea of the Metaverse by contrast is fundamentally a social notion concerned with the interconnection of many different disparate instances, for example the bridging of digital twins, simulations and game worlds (Yang et al., 2024) that aims to extend social interaction into visual representations. Therefore it is problematic that current digital twins of cities seem to almost exclusively focus on physical assets and physics simulations (Naderi & Shojaei, 2023) in isolated “walled garden” contexts. Walled gardens in this context mean a closed set of information services provided to members only. While they may be information-dense, richly interlinked and share a common focus, they have little or no linkage to or from the larger network of actors or other infrastructure services.
This gives the already mentioned challenge of limited integration of data, but it also limits the digital twins to the visualisations made available by the provider. If people wish to incorporate other forms of knowledge, or use the visualisations in different ways, through for example a visual canvas, this is hard or not possible. In this project we provide a different approach, allowing exploration through and by visualisations through the use of the tool as a boundary object, to create a visual canvas of actor landscapes, to facilitate empowerment and agency, allow experimentation and future thinking leading to actions and collaboration. In this way the tool extends agency to collaborate – actors between sectors and with local actors to enhance sustainable water futures.
How this links to my Post-Doc
Rather than trying to convince citizens through so-called “stakeholder engagement” about what the best approach is after the fact, AquaSavvy’s tool will allow citizens to imagine their best suited approaches at hyper-local levels relevant to their immediate lives, with an AI-assisted knowledge brokering that facilitates complicating the narrative, in other words incorporating divergent views, including information that challenges the dominant narrative and embracing counter-intuitive statements in a way that stimulates curiosity rather than conviction (Kahan et al., 2017; Gilligan & Eddy, 2021). In this way, the AquaSavvy tool facilitates the transformation of expertise to include a wider range of knowledge, while re-establishing trust in public authorities through the staging of new participatory planning approaches.
In order to change the paradigms of urban water cycles, we need to address the need for developing new integrative collaborations across sectors, with citizens and other local actors by re-aligning prevailing practices and boundaries within and between water and urban governance and everyday life (Taylor 1998). Thus, this project is about the transformation of expertise (Stampnitzky, 2023), facilitating a data-centric approach to changing paradigms. It is epistemic work, creating new kinds of knowledge. Rather than trying to convince citizens through so-called “stakeholder engagement” about what the best approach is after the fact, AquaSavvy’s tool will allow citizens to imagine their best suited approaches at hyper-local levels relevant to their immediate lives, with an AI-assisted knowledge brokering that facilitates complicating the narrative, in other words incorporating divergent views, including information that challenges the dominant narrative and embracing counter-intuitive statements in a way that stimulates curiosity rather than conviction (Kahan et al., 2017; Gilligan & Eddy, 2021). In this way, the AquaSavvy tool facilitates the transformation of expertise to include a wider range of knowledge, while re-establishing trust in public authorities through the staging of new participatory planning approaches.
Changing the paradigm of urban water cycles ultimately means changing the way that we think about knowledge, and who gets to contribute to knowledge. It challenges the view of citizen actors as contrasted to professional practices. At their cores, citizen science and community actors are tools for engaging all parts of society in complex environmental problems, mobilizing diverse individuals for change, and building populations equipped to advocate for their own health and environments (Dosemagen & Parker 2019). To complicate the narrative of “citizen science” it is necessary to approach it not as one, but as several different modes of social epistemologies. These diverse modes also instantiate a wide range of imagined epistemic agents; ‘the citizen’, ‘the volunteer’, ‘the participant’, ‘the crowd’, ‘the activist’, ‘the community’ et cetera – agents that in one way or another perform scientific research without being a professional scientist (Kasperowski and Kullenberg, 2019). (I didn’t put this in the proposal but considering these different ways of engaging could be explored through looking at them as “player types”?)
The professionalisation of science has in many cases even made volunteer contributors invisible, since professional actors (in the proposal I had scientists, which biases this towards science – my bias, which I did not correct everywhere) have often mistrusted their abilities, and eclipsed them away from proper acknowledgment in publications. Over time and the “politicization of science” (Eyal, 2019) mistrust in (especially regulatory) science has increased, people feel like “the experts are playing politics at their expense”, where experts in science and technology often have a privileged position that informs decision-making in a way that short-cuts democracy (Kasperowski and Kullenberg, 2019).
To regain this trust, we need to re-discover each other – civic technoscience on the one hand and institutional science on the other. This project takes inspiration from contributor knowledge infrastructures like OpenStreetMaps and Wikipedia, open process approaches like those espoused by GitHub and the Open Science Foundation (https://osf.io/), and aims to apply these approaches, critically, to the water sector. In our project, the aim of the Living Lab in Orø in particular is to document an example of a community initiative, Genskabet, that was created by non-professional scientists who formulate the scope and design of the entire research process, largely independently of established scientific knowledge (Kasperowski and Kullenberg, 2019). This is compared to the Living Lab in Bursa where the Living Lab hosts are inspired practitioners, straddling the worlds of community work and professional science albeit with some institutional backing.
The observations gained from this comparison are then tested further with observing and participating in virtual communities (the creation of which is facilitated where needs be by the consortium members and through the AquaSavvy Competition), to cultivate an ethos of bottom-up expertise created by concerned people that may not be sufficiently represented by current expert systems (Kasperowski and Kullenberg, 2019). Epistemic practices will be explored that are able to better capture the diversity of citizen science projects, and may include the following; ‘sensing’, ‘computing’, ‘analysing’, ‘self-reporting’ and ‘making’ (Strasser et al 2018) facilitated through the AI-assisted AquaSavvy platform.