Listening to soil
This study explores the learning possible from including the public in explorations of more-than-human future visions. An installation at a design festival gave material form to a speculative scenario that emerged from ethnographic research with urban permaculture farmers, using sounds to represent concentrations of nutrients in soil. We studied how visitors wearing a sensor ring experienced the playing of these sounds upon insertion of a finger in the installation’s soil. Responses underscore the importance of cultivating the skill of noticing through deep listening, alongside the profound connection thus established between humans and the more-than-human world.
Read more in the DRS 2024 paper: “Does phosphorus want to sound like that?’ - Experiencing more-than-human futures”. The paper examines implications for practices of noticing and presents four principles for problematising and reimagining how data pertaining to the more-than-human world may be sensed and represented.