I first heard of pocket parks when Birgitte was giving a presentation about water sensitive urban design, and citizen participation. She mentioned Pocket Parks in Portland (I cannot hear Portland without saying to myself “Keep Portland weird!“)
Continue reading “Pocket Parks”AquaSavvy: Street flow Sankey
Continuing from the layer perspective and the house level view, here I played with the street level view. Inspiration:
My brief: For the street level, let’s explore taking a OpenStreetMap view of a street, and then converting it from the top down map view, to the idealised, hand drawn version with inputs and outputs.
Continue reading “AquaSavvy: Street flow Sankey”AquaSavvy: House flow Sankey
Carrying on from the Layered visualisation, I started playing with what a house level, or street level visualisation could look like. Some inspiration off the web:
Layered visualisation of resource flows
Inspired by Fil’s Layers Perspective, as well as this papercraft calendar. The idea is to be able to isolate some elements, and then see how they relate.
Cape Town sewage flows
As part of thinking through the AquaSavvy tool visualisations, I revisited an idea from a loooong time ago (2018) that was part of the inspiration for AquaSavvy.
As an exercise, I’m not sure how this would make it into the AquaSavvy tool as is. I had to do a lot of wrangling with Claude, that I don’t think a layperson could or would want to do. It’s fine for the project to do this for our selected sites, but as a global tool meeting people where they are, I don’t know.
Continue reading “Cape Town sewage flows”AquaSavvy tool ideas: Emotion map
Note: This is part of the active AquaSavvy project. We’re prototyping ideas for rending the data into the visualisation tool.
The conversation started with “How can we visualise our emotions and responses to water?”
Continue reading “AquaSavvy tool ideas: Emotion map”AquaCurious
I’m applying to the MSCA fellowship again, sucker for punishment. My current draftsummary as of 10 august is:
| AquaCurious: Cultivating Curiosity-Driven, Gameful Coalition Culture for Sustained Civic-Led Water Partnerships. I ask what capacities let civic and intermediary actors contribute to, rather than draw down, the care that sustains coalition-based water governance, and then work to design gameful approaches to nurture these capacities. AquaCurious bridges three fields: polycentric governance, gameful design, and feminist ethics of care, treating care-laden coordination labour as a design principle rather than a diversity problem to legitimise afterward. The design of a pocket park in Tampere serves as vehicle, anchoring the development of a design framework through iterative, workshop-tested engagement, using deep canvassing and behavioural coding of curiosity and cognitive labour. Gameful approaches that inspire the design include parkrun, already studied elsewhere as a coalition-governance actor and World of Warcraft guilds as holding structure. Outputs include a practitioner toolkit, ritual-template infrastructure recommendations, and a specific policy recommendation aimed at municipalities to pre-institutionalize mechanisms for intermediary and civic-actor participation. This proposal is aimed at converting my demonstrated but institutionally unrecognised leadership into sustainable, fundable independent practice. |
Fever duck dream
I dreamt a lot last night, take that for eating roast duck just before bed!
Update: the song for this (not in the dream, but it captures the zeitgeist): Don’t Take the Money by the Bleachers:
Building the ecology of the Metaverse
We are a collective, using digital technologies to address the challenge of interacting with complex knowledge ecosystems. We use people-centric technology development to empower informed, accountable action from the bottom up. Using digital hyper-connected, integrated technologies – what we understand as the Metaverse – potentially gives grassroots initiatives the ability to contribute to the growing integrated knowledge ecosystem – the Metaverse as an ecosystem – and thereby scale their efforts and networks globally. We are looking for consortium members to pursue research funding, or strategic partnerships with companies interested in the commercial potential of these approaches. Please find some use cases below with more information. We also welcome anyone to join the journey; find us on Discord – the Open Metaverse Interoperability Group (OMI) (website: omigroup.org/) or email me at bernellev@gmail.com.
Continue reading “Building the ecology of the Metaverse”Talk: The potential for emergent games to foster curiosity
This is a talk I gave for the Distributed Immersive Participation group, Stockholm University on 28 March 2025. I was happy to have a reason to update my talk, as the ones I gave on this topic in 2019 and 2022 were terribly out of date by now.
Slides: https://indiebio.co.za/curiosity_metaverse_adapted_24mar2025.html
pdf (27MB)
recording: on youtube