Feeling Climate Change:
Intersections of Climate Change and Everyday Cyclists
Master of Design Thesis — Design Phase
Problem Space
My interest in the intersection of cyclists and climate change is a little selfish. It is situated in my own commitment to everyday cycling — I’ve been riding bikes in Seattle for the past twelve years for a plethora of reasons: racing, commuting, touring, delivering pizza, critical mass . . . you name it! Cycling is a practice I love — it has defined many aspects of my identity and community. However, spending the last few summers making the dubious decision to continuing to bike commute in spite of the doomsday, forest-fire-ash-filled air, I began to wonder if these wildfires were related to climate change, and if so, what other strange or unexpected side effects of climate change would impact my cycling practices and health in the future. Therefore, my thesis seeks to take climate change, a phenomenon somewhat beyond perception due to its global and generational scale, and make it tangible and meaningful for everyday cyclists.
Every day cyclists are a poetic node within the web of climate change intersections — cyclists, while doing something inherently positive in the fight against global warming, are ironically being exposed to the negative impacts of climate change on a daily basis, and ultimately, possibly, limited in the amount they could safely cycle outdoors. Additionally, beyond the tension between the ecological ‘good’ of bike commuting and the inevitable ‘bad’ exposure to unhealthy aspects of climate change, cyclists are interesting subjects because (as my research reflects) their daily exposure to the elements yields a rich, latent, embodied and sensorial understanding of the local Seattle climate.
But why, one might ask, is my design direction concerned with making climate change more tangible? Partly because tangibility dovetails with cyclists unique, embodied practices and their sensorial ways of understanding Seattle’s climate. But in addition, at a higher level, one of the main hypotheses of my thesis is that a reason people under-react to climate change is the difficulty in feeling or perceiving it. This is largely due to the scale at which climate change operates. Timothy Morton describes climate change adeptly when he calls it a hyperobject, a term he coined in his book Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013). According to Morton, hyperobjects are, “viscous, which means they “stick” to beings that are involved with them, they are nonlocal, in other words, and “local manifestation” of a hyper object is not directly the hyperobject” and, “they involve profoundly different temporalities than the human-scale ones we are used to.” I’m excited by this definition for my research because it explains how climate change is hard to see in totality, but leaves local, ‘viscous’ traces and how climate change operates at temporalities beyond human-scale perception (which is why climate change is so often expressed in graphs/charts/projections/models). My primary research also exposed the ‘hyperobject’ nature of climate change from the perspective of Seattle’s everyday cyclists. In my semi-structured interviews, I noticed that while almost all of my participants felt a deep sadness about the concept of climate change, they were hard-pressed to point to specific evidence of it in their day-to-day-commute, citing temporal reasons for the difficulty in perception such as, “it’s hard to put a finger on it” or “give me ten more years”.
Therefore my thesis seeks to create speculative tools to make climate change tangible in its intersection with daily bike commuting practices, leveraging the localized, nuanced and embodied knowledge cyclists have of experiencing Seattle’s climate to bridge the perceptual, temporal gap in understandings of climate change. The ultimate hope of this project is two-fold. First, I am interested in researching how speculative design can utilize embodied histories to understand possible futures by situating my design in a cyclists’ history of practice, deferring the speculation to a participant’s unique perspective and imagination and enabling embodied reflection in action. My second goal is to design a playful way to shift conversations about climate change from a debate about whether or not it is real, to a more nuanced discussion, based in experience, about how climate change is already happening and will happen in the future. Essentially, I am trying to shift the scale of discussion to a more personal, local level, perhaps inspiring a new type of action. This is an experiment. It is research. I don’t know if it will work.
Research Insights
My research consisted of three different methods: I started with autobiographical explorations about how my own personal cycling practice related to bike gear, environment, and the elements. I then conducted more formalized research using semi-structured interviews and a design research probe. In my interviews, I asked Seattle’s everyday cycling community about how their cycling practices intersect with Seattle’s weather, seasons and climate change and I used the probe, which was meant to be more speculative and generative, to look for what concerned and/or intrigued cyclists about climate change and to inspire future design directions.
From my research, the following insights were most helpful in guiding my eventual design direction:
- As mentioned earlier, climate change is happening at a scale beyond perception — while most interviewed cyclists reported deep sadness about the concept of climate change, they had a hard time pinpointing tangible evidence of climate change in their everyday commute.
- While cyclists did have some observations and hunches about climate change, they were ambivalent — participants expressed a mix of positive and negative impacts and hypotheses. For example, participants reflected on how warmer weather could encourage more cycling and variable/extreme weather is at times beautiful/exciting to ride through, however, climate change might make cycling more complex and less safe due to harder rain, worse air quality, flooding, mudslides, extreme heat, etc.
- All but one cyclist expressed concern about climate change adding complexity to their cycling practices (in terms of needing more/new gear or dealing with more extreme weather) and making unhealthy conditions for riding (in terms of heat and air quality).
- Cycling gear relates to knowledge of climate and shift in seasons — during fall, participants reported always keeping a rain jacket handy and many participants were concerned their current gear would become more complicated, degrade faster, or become irrelevant due to climate change.
With these insights in mind, my design question became:
“How might the impacts of climate change on the everyday cyclist be made tangible through speculative cycling tools/gear?
This question seeks ways that that tangible, wearable technologies might help bridge the perceptual gap brought on by climate change’s scale by allowing cyclists to envision and reflect on potential outcomes of climate change over histories of personal, embodied exposure to climate garnered through their cycling practices.
Ideation
As a starting point for ideation, I did two rounds of low-fidelity, “one-liner + a sketch” sticky notes (above, left). This approach allowed me to see all of my ideas in one place and organize them into themes. In the first round, I organized my sticky notes by major opportunities I found in my research and by whether the idea was a product, an experience, or a fiction (these categories didn’t stay, I was just trying stuff out). In my second round, I recycled my favorite ideas from the previous round while adding more and I started to group ideas via timeline and theme. I am not surprised a timeline emerged — as time is always a factor in speculative design — and the categories were straightforward, being: history, present, present/future and future. Historical solutions could have included ideas like, ‘a world where cars were never invented’, solutions based in the present were interested in identifying climate change as it exists now, present/future solutions were interested in identifying climate change trends of the future and creating a way to experience those things today, and future solutions were mainly diegetic — imagining future scenarios and designing artifacts to support those narratives.
In addition to these time-based categories, my thematic groupings showed a range of possible focuses: the solution could relate to the bike specifically, be wearable or interactive outerwear, utilize mapping, or be a diegetic prototype from some distant climate change impacted future.
I then created half-sheets with categorical sliders to help me gauge the range of ideas I was generating. The sliders were: human-centered/post-anthropocentric, no-tech/tech, single body part/full body, current observations/future vision.
As I worked through general ideas and solutions, I also came up with a set of design principles based on my research findings. This design direction needed to:
- Make climate change data tangible.
- Design to shift conversations around climate change — not does it exist, but what will it be like? What is it like already?
- Because of generational time scales, design to bend time, overlaying future data/projections over in situ experiences.
- Leverage cyclists’ innate knowledge of Seattle’s weather, seasons and unique topography and geography.
And I had my own personal set of goals as well, I wanted my design to be:
- Something wearable (embodied technology, experiential)
- Speculative / provocative /critical (possibly fiction)
- Simple
- Fun
- Weird / Colorful / Textural / Strange
Design Direction
For my design direction, I wanted to ‘bend time’ by tangibly overlaying future climate change projections over present-day bike rides through mechatronic cycling gear designed to meaningfully move and shift states as a cyclist goes on a ride. Through wearing and experiencing these garments, cyclists can reflect in action as they experience climate change projections in a sort of transparent overlay that meshes with their existing memories and knowledge of Seattle’s climate, weather, geography and topography.
The first garment I’m creating is called Heat Shrink Jersey. This jersey slightly compresses and pokes the ribs of a rider depending on humidex values (temperature + humidity) to serve as a warning about temperatures that could be dangerous for the cyclist to ride in. The slight compression and discomfort of the jersey mimics the way riding on hot days can sometimes feel claustrophobic, uncomfortable, and/or oppressive.
This garment relates to a dataset that is (in the relative time frames of climate change) relatively immediate — within the next 30 years (2050) we will experience an average temperature increase of 5°F, and by 2080, 5–9°F of warming. In addition, heat poses more of a risk to health when compounded by humidity. According to a 2010 study by Isaksen et al., there is a significant increase in mortality rates and hospital admissions at the humidex threshold of 97.5°F. This might sound like a high number, but at Seattle’s average humidity on a July day (65%), that is actually only a temperature of 84°F!
For this reason, the heat shrink jersey will activate any time the current humidex value, plus 5°F, is equal to or greater than 97°F to simulate the frequency that a 97°F humidex value will occur in 2050. This number is a rough estimate but will give riders a ballpark sensation of how frequently they will experience temperatures in the future that might put them at risk for heat-related illness.
The sensors for this garment will be placed on the bike, allowing cyclists to explore hyper-local climates areas. To calculate humidex, I will use the combined readings from a wet bulb humidity sensor and a temperature sensor. These sensors will be secured under the saddle of the bike as the cyclist rides which will shield the sensors from direct sunlight (which can skew temperature readings) and encourage air circulation (which gives better temperature readings). The sensors will be connected to a microcontroller which will run the computation for humidex from the raw heat and humidity values. As mentioned above, any value over 92°F will actuate the garment and squeeze the rider.
This jersey relates to more specific research insights, both in how cyclists respond to riding in hot weather and their speculations about their intersections with climate change. Warming was mentioned by three of my five semi-structured interview participants as a tentative sign of global warming in their day-to-day life. One cyclist even mentioned the summer of 2015 as being a possible premonition of climate change, being notably hotter than usual, which is a summer often pointed to by climate scientists as a measure of what future, warmer, summers will feel like.
In a more speculative space, my probe elicited some of the ambivalence cyclists feel about the pros and cons of warming. Almost every participant either commented on how heat would affect their gear (“maybe if it gets too hot my helmet will melt”), or how it might make riding more accessible (“looking forward to more warm days”). In my mapping exercise, most participants reported taking longer rides for fun in the summer months. However, they also mentioned many ways in which heat is problematic: a participant who works as a bike messenger mentioned that hot weather takes a toll on him and his colleagues due to relentless exposure, another cyclist mentioned that rides in hot weather are more complicated because she has to diligently plan refueling and water stops to not risk heat exhaustion and yet another rider commented on how heat makes her feel inefficient on the bike and is hard to recover from.
Cyclists also seem to have a latent understanding of microclimates in Seattle, which might be reinforced through this garment. Some cyclists mention riding closer to water in hotter months, mentioned certain valleys that seem colder than their surrounding terrain, or how waterfront trails are considerably windier and less protected than areas with architectural density like downtown.
In summary, it seems that while warmer weather could encourage more riding in some cases, there is a threshold above which riding will be taxing (especially when there are streaks of hot days, compounding fatigue), potentially unsafe, and require extra planning. I am curious to see how reflecting on warming through a tangible experience of the heat shrink jersey, which will respond to microclimates in real-time, might allow cyclists to reflect on their route choices, futures of hotter weather, and the impacts it might have on their cycling practices.
The second garment I’m creating is titled High Water Pants. A play on the colloquial term for pants that expose the ankle, jokingly associated with a coming flood, my concept is tied to data about sea level rise stemming from climate change. In the case of these High Water Pants, the pant legs raise and lower in correspondence with areas in Seattle that will be acutely impacted by sea level rise in the future.
The most common areas affected will be coastlines that intersect Puget Sound and areas of Seattle near the Duwamish River. My hope is that through the sensation of a pant leg raising, cyclists will be cued-in to areas of their current ride that will be impacted in 30 to 80 years by chronic flooding and erosion.
The benefit of a pant leg raising and lowering, in contrast to another type of sensation, is that there is immediate attention garnered by the raising pant leg that can then fade into a more peripheral awareness as a cyclist continues to ride. For example, a cyclist might ride along the Alaskan Way waterfront and continue onto the Elliot Bay trail (all areas that could be impacted by chronic flooding in the future), a route which could take upwards of 20 minutes to complete. If this is the case, a more acute sensation (vibration or knocking against the cyclist with the arm of a servo motor) might get annoying and hinder reflection or enjoyment of the bike ride. The raising and lowering pant leg has the potential to be more innocuous and fade in and out of the cyclists’ direct attention, calling attention to borders or thresholds, while maintaining the ability to fade to a background sensation relatively easily.
The datasets that these pants respond to are sea level rise projections for the Puget Sound region. Water levels in the area have already risen about 8 inches in the last century, and are projected to rise 10 inches by 2050 and 28 inches by 2100. If the sea level rises 28 inches, Seattle’s 100-year flood incident (in which sea level to rises 38 inches above the normal high tide line) will happen more than once a year. This will push the new 100-year incident to a level that is 4 feet above today’s high tide, by 2050.
Although Seattle is not at risk to completely and dramatically disappear under water, we are projected to experience more flooding caused by storm surges and high tides due to higher water tables. According to mapping done by NOAA and UW Climate Impacts Group, the areas most impacted will be the coasts that intersect with the Puget Sound and areas around the Duwamish River watershed. For this reason, my garment will use these predictive maps as a rough area for geofencing, which will be used to actuate the pants through the google maps API and a Bluetooth connection to a microcontroller in the waistband of the pants. Below is a rough estimate of where my geofencing will take place. All areas that are pink will correlate with a raised pant leg, all areas beyond will have a lowered pant leg.
Unlike the Heat Shrink Jersey, which responds to the nearer-term phenomenon of warming (something cyclists already intrinsically seem to understand) the High Water Pants respond to the longer-term phenomenon of sea level rise, which is more difficult for cyclists to conceptualize in terms of impacts. The garment, therefore, has the potential to fill a gap in cyclists understanding of intersections of sea level rise and cycling.
While cyclists are acutely aware of how wet conditions complicate cycling, they don’t have an awareness of how sea level rise might impact their practices. Some of their insights about riding in wet weather might be applicable to reflection about flooding due to sea level rise, however. In my research probe’s mapping exercise, many cyclists mentioned having different routes for rainy weather like avoiding routes with steep descents or brick surfaces because they are dangerous when wet. In addition, almost all cyclists interviewed noted that wetter riding makes riding more complicated: it requires more planning and gear, makes braking performance worse, and wears down components faster. I was also surprised no cyclists mentioned heavy rain and flooding. I have certainly been in situations where I couldn’t see where a curb started or ended because of flooding.
However, no cyclists noted flooding as a potential impact of global warming, and I think this is due to a lack of general knowledge about climate change projections for increased heavy rain incidents and sea level rise. These pants explore a longer timescale than the jersey with less predictable, but harder to mitigate, impacts — sea level rise is expected to impact public health, city infrastructures and geological formations. Hopefully, these pants will stimulate cyclists to be more aware of the impacts of a higher water table on their practices through building on their existing understanding of wet-weather cycling in Seattle’s unique topography and geography.
Process
As described above, I did some ideation by way of sticky notes and half sheets. I also created some storyboards to develop and support my basic concepts for the two garments described above.
I then created a range of forms and concepts for how the garments could be constructed and what types of sensations they could create (below). I thought of different ways pants could raise and lower and how a cyclists’ position on a bike would integrate into the construction of these garments as well as what sensations would be created and what materials would be used.
I then chose two directions I was interested in and started experiments to explore fabric manipulation techniques and material qualities and behaviors.
In addition, I was simultaneously researching climate change datasets that I felt would suit my garments. I worked alongside Guillaume Mauger of the UW Climate Impacts Group to refine which climate change projections I would use and how I would frame them within my garments. I was looking for datasets that would offer clean interactions at meaningful thresholds. The movements of riding a bike are gross-motor and small interactions or detailed interactions might be missed, therefore, I thought larger, ‘on’ and ‘off’ type experiences might be more powerful and impactful for reflection. For that reason, I chose data that had clear thresholds so that I could build clear, data-driven, mechanical actuation of my garments.
In addition, I have been exploring mechanical solutions for actuating garments while a cyclist’s legs are in motion. I have conducted rapid prototyping through physical experiments of riding with self-actuated mechanisms like string-pulls on my pant legs or dangling beads, rough prototyping on existing pants, and building gears and spools and sketching, drawing and painting.
Finally, I interviewed senior software developer Ed Mancebo who has experience coding for physical computing to begin to explore ways of actuating the garments via Google Maps data over Bluetooth. This is how I decided to explore geofencing and discovered there is an app already partially developed to enable Bluetooth communication with an Arduino. In addition, I have been working with Afroditi Psarra from the UW DX Arts program on alternative methods for connecting a microcontroller to live phone data.
My most recent prototype, below, I developed a mock leg and an actuating pant pull-up mechanism using a 180-degree servo motor, a circuit playground express and a spool I laser cut.
Here is my code for this:
#include <Servo.h>
Servo myservo; // create servo object to control a servo
// twelve servo objects can be created on most boards
//can chain servos,
//this is code that turns the servo 180 on one push and back 180 on the second push.//constant varialbes
const int buttonPin = 4;//variables that store positions etc
//servo
int pos = 0; // variable to store the servo position//button
int buttonState = 0; // start of button
int buttonPushCounter = 0;
int lastButtonState = 0;void setup() {
myservo.attach(1); // attaches the servo on pin 1 to the servo object or A7pinMode(buttonPin, INPUT); // setting up button as input
//serial print so that we can see the on off of the button
Serial.begin(9600);
}void loop() {
//first read state of button
buttonState = digitalRead(buttonPin);// compare the buttonState to its previous state
if (buttonState != lastButtonState) {
//if the state is changed, increment the counter by finding out if it is high, if yes, then add
if (buttonState == HIGH) {
buttonPushCounter++;
Serial.println(“on”);
Serial.print(“number of button pushes: “);
Serial.println(buttonPushCounter);
} else {
//if low, then the button is ‘off’ so, say so.
Serial.println(“off”);
}
// delay a little bit to avoid bouncing? (idk.)
delay(50);
}
// ok now make the buttonState the ‘last button state’
lastButtonState = buttonState;if (buttonPushCounter % 2 != 0) {
if (buttonState == HIGH) {
for (pos = 0; pos <= 180; pos += 1) {
myservo.write(pos);
delay(10);
Serial.println(pos);
} } else {
myservo.write(pos);
}
}
if (buttonState == LOW) {
myservo.write(pos);
}if (buttonPushCounter % 2 == 0) {
if (buttonState == HIGH) {
for (pos = 180; pos >= 0; pos -= 1) {
myservo.write(pos);
delay(10);
Serial.println(pos);
} } else {
myservo.write(pos);
}
}
if (buttonState == LOW) {
myservo.write(pos);
}
}
Wish me luck on my journey towards creating these garments! Stay tuned for the final chapter :)