Free_range_umbrellas

Community, mobility, autonomy & improvisation 

A participatory experience that inspires transient social collaboration and re-casts pedestrians as source of innovation in unfolding techno-social situations

The world we live in…

Pedestrians are often faced with car-centric mobility landscape, fragmented and discontinued by low density of relations to surroundings and each other. Not only it creates more dangerous environment for pedestrians, but also breaks the continuity of human relations.

Walking is the most human form of mobility, indicating social energy in a community.

When we walk freely in a city, we connect human interests, the influence of presences, transient social relations, and meaning of behaviors to the surroundings, weaving a network of serendipitous encounters. The sense of “being able to walk continuously without disruptions” foster the concept of walkability and livable neighborhoods.

 Human experience “the walk” emerges through moments, through mood, and through atmosphere. It’s a set of affordances that make pedestrians feel safe, related and welcomed, rather than physical infrastructures or installations.

Our culture has taught us to label the autonomy and Otherness of things and creatures around us as Strange and unsanctioned.

Practice of improvisation into the way we look at the design of interactions in today’s hybrid urban environments means inviting Strange moments to be experienced together. It means allowing for the unexpected and the unforeseeable, embracing this Other in the way we shape and activate our environment.

Kinesthetic response brings attention to other bodies in space, to their movements, and it encourages exploration of one’s own behavior as being affected by external mobility.

The goal of Free_range_umbrellas isn’t to replace conventional street lighting but to inspire participatory experience of playful transient collaboration, where people use light to co-create the pulse of their city.

Our experiential design proposal argue on behalf of vision of a community built of benevolent forms of transient collaboration, improvised, collaborative city, where people use light to participate in social energy of their city.Umbrellas are programmed to recognize each other and instigate playful exchanges of rhythms and colors. Their interactions form patterns left to be recognized through our imaginative collaboration.

Kinesthetic response brings attention to other people in space, to their movements, and it encourages exploration of one’s own behavior as being affected by external mobility.

Our design takes inspiration from the very nature of city’s improvised forms of radiant social interaction, embracing disarming surprise and meaningful unexpectedness as constructive aspects of benevolent social collaboration that gives city it’s vibrant soul.
Free range umbrellas create an evocative situation for people to explore.

What if we intentionally probe a new forms of benevolent social intervention?

What if we introduce a participatory object as a social signifier of perceived affordances supporting walkability and sense of social presence?

What if we design a participatory experience that inspires transient social collaboration, invite kinesthetic impulse and re-casts pedestrians as a source of innovation in unfolding techno-social situations of the collaborative city?

Free_range_umbrellas are playful, highly visible, luminescent, street-smart, analog/digital, participatory tools. These street-smart-tech umbrellas are tools of social collaboration, they communicate pedestrian presence, intent and right to cross the street. Deployed with participation of local community, in simple containers attached to lampposts, in stretches of road too far from designated crosswalks.

The bodies in space directly involved, in the context of the lighting application, are the people and the lighting structures, and the development of lighting behavior can be based on the proximity between these two. The intensity of a light can increase as a person comes close, reflecting the impact of a passerby.

Their behavior and patterns are also in perpetual conversations with one another. These umbrellas are programmed to recognize each other and instigate playful exchanges of rhythms and colors. These interactions, form patterns, inviting our imaginative collaboration. They’re built to create an evocative and perceptual collaboration for people to participate actively in social energy of their city.

Free_range_umbrellas goal is to make us more perceptive and invite sense of participation in shared space, and foster improvised interactions in techno-social systems of collaborative city.