LARP and Smart Environments: a conversation with Lynne Falconer

The participatory system co-design LARP we are currently developing will be set in a sensor-enabled ‘smart environment’. We wanted to find out more about these contexts and their challenges, so we met with Lynne Falconer (Stirling) for a fascinating chat about her research on smart aquaculture and ‘precision farming’, with a focus on salmon farming in Scotland. One of Lynne’s main research interests is how data produced in commercial aquaculture settings can also be used for climate modelling. She told us that farmers might find value in working with data at the necessary scale and temporality because – thanks to the kind of modelling Lynne is able to do – it could help them be ready for a variety of sudden events, as well as more gradual change.

This discussion was fascinating for us at the FGD project. It’s important for us to pay attention to the practical side of technical systems, but also how ‘existential’ factors, which are receiving new attention, are valued and articulated within broader sociotechnical, legal and economic systems. We learned a lot about the practical side of managing and maintaining environmental sensors, the difficulty of getting robust, consistent data, the potential role of data standards (but also the importance of accounting for local contexts), some approaches to storing and accessing data at scale, and some of the reasons why local system designers might make decisions in particular ways. We also got into some big-picture issues like the relation between tech development and economic value, the human-centrism of ecosystem services, and the role of smart technologies in technicizing environmental and aquacultural knowledge – thus potentially marginalising generational ‘know-how’, impacting jobs, favouring larger business structures, and creating the need for new kinds of support and capacity-building. Finally, we discussed how LARP as a method can work to bring diverse expertise together while enabling lateral and creative engagement.