Entry 1 - Responding to the Brief

When we were first introduced to the Natural History Museum brief, my first reaction was excitement coupled with uncertainty. The NHM gardens aren't just the grass behind the famous museum building, it is a living science experiment housing 27 sensor sites collecting real-time data on live environmental activity like soil moisture, temperature, acoustic recordings and biodiversity. However, as the brief stressed, much of this data was not reaching the people who visited the gardens; visitors had no way of accessing or connecting to it.

This gap was a design problem, it wasn't formed out of a technical failure but an inherent lack of translation. The data existed, the audience was there, the connection just hadn't yet been made.

The constraints set out in the brief were clear; the concept had to connect three domains (the gardens, the museum, and the community), be rooted in sensor data, be designed for actual museum visitors and encourage community engagement. These constraints prevented us from forming easy solutions, we couldn't just design an app that displayed soil moisture readings. Our design solution had to be focused on building connections.

Initially as a group we thought about the people who go to the NHM. Families. School groups. Children who drag their parents to the dinosaur near the entrance. This group felt like one we could potentially design for.

In these early stages of responding to the brief, I thought about what Papanek calls the responsibility of the designer to the "user as a whole person," meaning not just the user's functional needs but their capacity to be moved, to learn and to feel part of something. The sensor data at the NHM felt like it could do that, making invisible environmental data visible and legible in a way that it was able to be felt beyond being just processed. At this stage we didn't know what we were making or how but we knew what the solution had to do.

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Papanek, V. (1971) Design for the Real World. New York: Pantheon Books.