squirrel nation so I studied the brain
and Caroline studied visual arts as you
heard and we’ve been merging that ever
since Caroline works at BBC as well as a
designer I’m a teacher university of
salford but now we’re going to talk
about groups the stuff we do is grow
nation and we create experiences and
today we hope to demonstrate the power
of observation that half is reimagine
to get you closer to this idea and watch
this is an awareness test how many
the answer is 13 but did you see the
hands up his spot at the moonwalking
bear the first time around can’t see a
run but it looks like it’s roughly a
third of you so what’s happening here
this is an experiment designed by
simonton Shabery in the 90s at Harvard
University and the original experiment
actually involved a gorilla that thump
his chest they found that fifty percent
of people who watch the video missed the
gorilla it was as if the gorilla didn’t
exist so what’s going on here well two
things we miss a lot of what goes on
around us and actually we have no idea
of what we’re missing and get closer
says that I did I was interested in how
plants sense environments now care for
example detect changes in different
wavelengths of red light red light sense
that dawn when the Sun rises and it’s
far red light that stint as at dusk when
the Sun sets this creates a switch that
lets the plants tent the length of night
this means that plants know when it’s
summertime but the night’s get shorter
this has been manipulated by flower
boroughs to provide flowers after season
and we made a film called nature switch
to try and detect the switch by
situation ourselves in a range of
settings and fill many environments at
dusk and dawn we observed a plant and a
bur oak tree our allotment air filled
two cities in industrial greenhouse we
tried to make the invisible visible an
adult questioning what natural on what
is man-made so this film that we made
nature switch it was screened originally
in a gallery in london and then it was
exhibited outside in the wilderness of
an overgrown cemetery at festival in the
East End of London we were lucky enough
to sit in a field as the Sun went down
and the film was screened and it was
amazing moment for us because the film
was reconnected to that natural switch
that inspired it in our lifetime humans
have become the equivalent asteroid did
I and dinosaurs here now here’s a scary
thought if we can imagine life on Earth
without humans could this happen imagine
an alternative future that we can become
so according to astronomer Martin Rees
if the 21st century were put into the
wider context of the universe which we
imagine started in January and ended in
December the 20th century would only be
around for a quarter as second in June
and yet we’ve had a massive impact so
how did you imagine a life beyond
yourselves I asked a few people where a
teacher at Salford University how they
might imagine that scenario and they
suggested looking to science fiction
movies like I am Legend and silent
running or places where civilization has
collapsed or to imagine the world from
the perspective of another species I
suggested introducing a super predator
as thinking of aliens and a conservation
is said Rob young said to me we’ve
already introduced super predators arima
with our over youth of antibiotics so
are we sleep walking into creating a
future for human but without humans so
thinking from that perspective of a
world without us without humans could
this help us to be more conscious of the
future with creating back in 2015 we got
our hands dirty we started farming
organic vegetables and a countryside
just outside Manchester we love low
finland’s and then escapes and long
horizons and gannon away from our
computer screens and cityscapes we love
the feeling of working hard physically
in carrying a long term for the stolen
crops we realized though that very few
red city residents can experience us we
decided to tackle this by bringing a
pop-up container farm from the
countryside into the city centre in
Manchester and we called this farm lab
it was a bit of an experiment and our
first crop is oyster mushrooms why
mushrooms you might think so edible
mushrooms like oyster mushrooms that are
funghi so it is a whole other species
and fungi are nature’s great recyclers
and their mycelium the cells that live
as an underground network can digest
organic materials like wood straw and
coffee grounds turning them into food
that’s rich in protein
so how could thinking from the
perspective of the oyster mushroom open
up new connections to the natural world
and we were inspired by this guy Paul
Stamets so we set up this pop-up farm
and we had a coffee trike next to the to
the to the farm and we people drink your
coffee we’d collect the waste coffee
grounds from the coffee trike and then
people would take some of mycelium and
then put that into 500 grams of coffee
waste in a bag and people would take
that home put it into a dark cupboard
and six to eight years 88 years you know
six to eight weeks later it will be
taken out with a bit of light of water
which mimics autumn and this would turn
into 50 grams of edible mushrooms that
you could then have for breakfast so the
whole journey from waste coffee grounds
to growing mushrooms to cooking and
eating mushrooms is made visible all
within the space of a few few miles or
even a few metres with our pop up and
the contents of the bag and this is for
Paul Stamets really can be put back into
the ground to reinvigorate the soil
going back to her original premise to
demonstrate how the power of observation
can help us reimagine our relationship
with the natural world we use the future
scale from now all theaters are possible
without looking at where we’re heading
though we tend to move towards the
probable and miss out on all of the rest
of the Eternity futures that lie ahead
Boris who designers cone suggests
they’re free laws of future one that the
future is not predetermined to that the
future is not predictable and three
future outcomes can be influenced by our
choice in the present preferable futures
are subject subjectively what what we
want to happen based on our value
judgments which vary greatly between
people so will tend to prospectus of
valuable in designing a future that we
a lot of people found it really
difficult to imagine how we can make
this mushroom contain a farm fortunately
we found others in Manchester and
Yorkshire who were obsessed with
mushrooms like us they’d read the same
book mycologist engineer’s manufacturers
and DIY mushroom growers and we
exhibited farm lab as part of an
allotment of the future in Manchester to
help manage the residents imagine what
food we might eat in the future with the
challenge of chromic coming with climate
change now it’s here in Manchester and
it’s taking up the space normally given
to a car in a car park next to a pub and
its presence has begun to get into
people’s margin imaginations and the pub
are planning a community garden with
local residents around that container so
we managed to bring organic growing from
the countryside into the inner city how
do we apply these that these ideas to a
range of man-made problems by
consciously involving people in the
sites and design of cities can we move
closer to getting a more sustainable
future so a few years back we visited
Malmo which has a very similar
industrial heritage to Manchester and
the City Council there oh oh you didn’t
see it cats no gorillas okay um anyway
the City Council in Malmo decided to
involve architects and construction
workers in the challenge of creating
biogas from food waste they simply built
food collection into the design and
construction of all new buildings and
the end result was a city that runs one
hundred percent on biogas from the food
waste collected from people’s homes
that’s our mushrooms and finally what
could we learn from our pets that we
love where love and don’t want to lose
in terms of our connection with other
species but that’s another story thanks
for listening you