How to bring nature into your digital world 6. Pay attention to the view from your window

Chapter plate by Carolyn Black in ‘Technobiophilia: nature and cyberspace’

I wrote most of Technobiophilia at home in a cottage in the English Midlands, sitting in front of a back room window overlooking a small courtyard containing potted plants. I had arranged the plants so they looked good when you were in the courtyard, but my window looked out onto only part of it, so most of the time I could not even see the beautiful greenery I had curated.

The view from my desk featured only a single white clematis bush, but clematis is a deciduous climber which booms gloriously for a few months and for the rest of the year looks like a drooping clump of dead sticks. And I was so deep in my work that I did not even notice the paucity of my view. It was only towards the very end of my research that it suddenly dawned on me that all the plants I had spent money and time on were at the other end of the courtyard and invisible from my window. Feeling rather foolish, I realized that not only would a simple rearrangement of the pots bring colour and greenery into my view all day long, but they would also be a working application of biophilic design. I moved them right away. From then on, as I sat writing, I could raise my eyes and enjoy brilliant red geraniums, multi-coloured mesembryanthemums opening to the sun and a succession of other beautiful and renewing greenery.

So here is a question: what kind of view do you have from the places where you work and relax?

My cottage window 2012

One aspect of my window view which was already biophilic was the fact that at the time I was living in an old country cottage where the mullioned windows of the sitting room had eight panes apiece. According to architectural designer Kent Bloomer, the large picture windows we so enjoy and which reinforce that sense of bringing the outdoors indoors are actually provoking a damaging level of cognitive dissonance. This is because, he explains, ‘we possess a psychological boundary around our bodies (and by extension around our houses) that divides, or separates, our sense of a personal, possessed interior space from an exterior extra-personal space.’ This boundary is vitally important to our experience of the world because it conditions our perceptions of the environment; it appears at places of entry and exit, providing visual information about ‘social rank, safety, cultural belief and the occupants’ relationship to nature’. Passing through the boundary indicates the near-possibility of touching and that haptic experience is, says Bloomer, ‘fundamentally critical in establishing a firm connection, a “contact” with the natural environment. Yet’, he goes on, ‘touching is precisely what is negated by the pure picture window!’

His solution is to make the boundary more obvious, not less, by investing in ‘the liminal transitional space of the window’ and using different tactile ornamentations to emphasize the threshold. By touching them, or being able to imagine touching them, ‘you may heighten your sensual association with the world outside’. Examples of such interventions include thicker or tinted glass, mullions connecting small panes, old-fashioned bottle-glass, leaded and stained glass, or even just patterned curtains or blinds. You can also buy large transfers of life-sized flowers and shrubs to stick onto picture windows, and various kinds of sun-catchers and mobiles to hang in front of them. All of these can establish a ‘visible and touchable moment of mediation between inside and outside’.

If that sounds a little far-fetched, consider this: Bloomer ends by pointing out that the ‘naked’ picture window ‘provides a sanitized vision and might even promote a false feeling of fulfilment predicated upon an illusion of experiencing and being connected to the natural environment’. His proposition does not seem to have been scientifically tested, and it rather contradicts the general belief that big picture windows strengthen our sense of the outdoors, but it is an interesting thesis and worthy of some experimentation.

For more see Kent Bloomer. ‘The picture window: The problem of viewing nature through glass’. In Biophilic Design, by Stephen R. Kellert, Judith H. Heerwagen and Martin L. Mador, 253– 262. New Jersey: Wiley, 2008.

How to bring nature into your digital world 5. Stone and wood in your workspace.

Roger Deakin at Walnut Tree Farm http://fivedials.com/images/88.jpg

How to bring nature into your digital world 5. Stone and wood in your workspace.

I’ve been reading Roger Deakin’s wonderful book ‘Wildwood: a journey through trees‘, and was thrilled by his descriptions of Walnut Tree Farm, the moated farmhouse where he lived for many years before his untimely death in 2006.  He bought the house in 1969 after spotting it nestling in neglected woodland, its ruined chimney rising above the trees. In the years that followed he slowly and lovingly renovated it piece by piece. He slept in every part of the property, including its fields. He swam joyously in its weed-filled moat.

Deakin was a nature geek and a craftsman. We can learn from him and combine his sensibilities with our online lives to create workspaces with his world in mind. And of all the things he made, it is his desk which most fascinates and inspires me.  He wrote in his journal:

Building the new desk under the window in the study, looking south across the garden to the moat. Perfectionism kicks in and all the same self-critical criteria that go into a piece of writing. I make a yew bracket to peg to the oak wall post and support the top, a slab of fine-grained Oregon pine, and a careful wooden sub-frame or chassis. I fill some open cracks in the grain with plaster, smooth it down and carefully stain it pale blue using a delicate watercolour brush. I hollow out one of the old bolt-holes in the top to accommodate a smooth, round flattened pebble from the Hebrides, like a tiny curling stone. It is a sort of worry-bead. (p17)

a stone from the beach

Try it.

Make some space on your desk for stone, wood, or shells that you have cleaned and shaped yourself.

Set aside a few minutes each day to enjoy the feel of them in your hands – the surface, the weight, the coolness, the warmth.

You may even choose to work colours and materials into the surface of the desk, as he describes above.

A treat, perhaps, for fingers more accustomed to keyboards and screens.

How to bring nature into your digital world: 4. Create a virtual garden

How to bring nature into your digital world: 4. Create a virtual garden

In those early days when the internet universe was tiny, the World Wide Web not yet born, and there was no such thing as Grand Theft Auto, hundreds of text-based virtual worlds were scattered across the net. They offered no movies, no pictures, no sound – only words. If you wanted to show people what you looked like you typed a command and wrote a description. If you wanted to build a home, or a vehicle, or a meeting place, you built it in lines of code and decorated it with words. Many of these worlds were used for role-play games but some, like LambdaMOO, were simply social spaces where people lived virtual lives parallel to their IRL (in real life) existences. They met up in places like The Living Room, the Hot Tub, and the notoriously intimate Sensual Respites. And they built their own homes, objects, gardens and landscapes, many of which were beautiful and all were highly improbable. LambdaMOO still exists today. Learn how to visit it here.

In their 1989 book The Experience of Nature, Rachel and Stephen Kaplan describe their notion of Attention Restoration Theory (ART), four ‘settings’ which each provide different kinds of restorative experience. The first of those is ‘being away’, ‘involving oneself in cognitive content different from the usual’. The human, they say, is a conceptual animal, and the experience of being away involves what is going on in the head as well as what is going on in the environment. So mental distance can be as important as literal distance. Even if you travel no further than your own garden, making the rounds to find new buds and make sure all is well ‘can feel like being quite distant from the world of pressures and obligations’. LambdaMOO, I think, is typical of the kind of virtual place where you might go to experience ‘being away’.

In Technobiophilia I tell the story of Yib, aka programmer and teacher Elizabeth Hess, who joined the LambdaMOO community in 1993 and set about creating The Formal Gardens.

Formal Gardens, Elizabeth Hess, LambdaMOO

When you enter this space, sentences scroll before your eyes like vertical ticker tape.  Things are happening around you. First:

A spider quietly works on her web in the silk tassel bush.

As an experienced MOO user, you know what to do.  Typing @examine here you discover which commands will work, and it appears that the garden flowers are perfumed, so you type smell flowers and the system immediately responds:

You smell a cascade of milk-white saxifrage.  The scent is lovely.

Stimulated by the description, your imagination releases a burst of sweet odours into your brain.  Then

A cricket chirps from somewhere in the greenery.

Hess programmed the Formal Gardens with embedded messages which changed in response to day and night, and to the passing of each month. She added extra touches, so that visitors could actually ‘pick’ the flowers and even ‘take them away’.  Today, she laughs about the fact that the flowery prose of their description was based not on her own experience, but that all of it – even the scents – were ‘fabricated from a bunch of flower gardening books.’

She had fun creating the Formal Gardens, but she also created a scene which was much closer to her heart, and this is something I noticed when I interviewed players at LambdaMOO for my book Hello World: travels in virtuality. There is a lot of play in such places, but also the freedom to build very personal creations inside the safety of a virtual world which is invisible to almost everyone else you know. So Elizabeth Hess told me about ‘The Green Cathedral’, It is ‘a description of a real place,’ she told me, ‘or a place that  *was*  real, before houses got built there’.

The Green Cathedral
You are in a tiny clearing nestled deep in the woods, surrounded by beech trees.   The branches overhead form an arched canopy of green, their leaves intertwining one with another, giving shelter to a carpet of soft, dry moss below.   The soft light of morning filters through the trees.   There is a stillness here.
A narrow path leads to the south, though it is almost completely overgrown.

‘The  name  came from the name of a clearing in the woods at a summer camp I attended,’ she explained.  ‘The description is based on a very secluded mossy clearing in the woods behind the house I grew up in, in Maine.’

We were type-talking together in the MOO and there was a pause at this moment, as there often is when the database checkpoints, but this felt like a different kind of pause, more pensive.

‘It’s worth walking to or from,’ she typed after a few seconds of silence. ‘There are nice exit messages.  The path to the green cathedral was one of my favorite parts.’

It was clear that the Green Cathedral meant a lot to her. The Formal Gardens were created from idealised catalogue descriptions, but the Green Cathedral came from her heart. It was the perfect example of the Kaplans’ notion of ‘being away’ — entering a place, either mentally or physically, which allows the mind to rest. It also relates to another of their settings, compatibility, of which more later. In Hess’s case, she finds compatibility in The Green Cathedral because it so closely connects with who she is.

You could wander in LambdaMOO forever. There are thousands of these virtual rooms, some public, some private, some connected by pathways, but most simply floating free in the ocean of data which is in turn contained within a box securely tucked away in a server farm somewhere.  There are thousands of locations, all of them both real and not real.

I built my own landscapes there. Years ago, I designed a room for the English fields I drove past every day on my way to work. With that window open on my screen but hidden behind project files and a browser full of web-pages, I would leave my office and fly a few miles south, where I could spend a minute or two now and then just being away.

The Fields, Sue Thomas, LambdaMoo

How to bring nature into your digital world 3. Use Twitter to follow people like herdyshepherd1 who work outdoors with animals.

How to bring nature into your digital world 3. Use Twitter to follow people who work outdoors with animals.

He’s grumbling as he works in the snow. “Big. Fat. Soft. Snowflakes. Yuck. Hate it.” he tweets. Then, tersely, “Sledging. Better in theory than practice.”

herdyshepherd1 is keeping us updated on how things are going up in the Cumbrian Fells of the English Lake District. He’s both funny and thoughtful. Earlier the same day, he posted a silly photo titled “Daft dogs”. Sometimes he thinks aloud about tasks a million miles from our imaginings “Clock ticking down now to lambs arriving. Sort ewes with twins off to look after them better, singles can manage.”

We follow his day as we drift in our personal Twitter streams in the office, on the bus, in the park, on the sofa, soaking up messages from a world most of us can barely imagine. His life is the object of our fantasies and it’s great to know that he’s right here,  amongst the trending banalities, global horrors, and intimate confidences. herdyshepherd1, his trusty dog, and his flock of Herdwicks.

As I write this they’re all sandwiched between Glenn Greenwald‘s update on the Snowden affair and entrepreneur Anil Dash‘s friendly banter with blogger Jason Kottke. Herdy Shepherd is showing us how pregnant ewes are counted through a veterinary scanner so we can forget just for a moment that we’re in the city. We can gaze across our paleo lunch plate of grass-produced meats to peer into a screen and feel the chill of those snowy peaks, shudder at the cold slush trampled by ungulate hooves, see the visible breath of panting dogs in the icy air. “Roads a bit slape” mumbles Herdy Shepherd. ‘Slape’? What does that mean? We have no idea, but it sounds deeply real.

Herdy Shepherd (who, by the way, chooses to remain anonymous) is just one of many people who work outdoors with animals and share what they do online. We can’t live their lives, but we can shadow their daily routines and get some vicarious sense of their physical worlds.

Animals play an important role in our imaginative lives, and this is also true online. In Technobiophilia I explain how the human/ animal connection is at the heart of biophilia. For example, researchers Katcher and Wilkins* worked with groups of children and found that an intense interest in animals ‘was common across the board’, even down to whether the children were cruel to them or took care of them. ‘Children who throw stones at birds and children who feed birds are both responding to what may be an innate tendency to focus their attention on living things,’ they wrote. Working with a group of boys aged 9 to 15 who had a range of attention-deficit and hyperactive disorders and lived in a residential home, they noted powerful positive effects among the children who participated in a nature education which included access to a collection of small animals they called the ‘zoo’. After 6 months’ exposure to the zoo the researchers found positive improvements in the children’s behaviour and interpersonal relationships. They concluded that ‘If biophilia exists, then it most probably exists as a disposition to attend to the form and motion of living things and, for animals at least, incorporate them into the social environment.’ Not all kids can have regular contact with animals, but perhaps people like Herdy Shepherd can at least give them a window into a very different universe.

*Katcher and Gregory Wilkins. ‘Dialogue with animals: Its nature and culture’. In The Biophilia Hypothesis, by Stephen R. Kellert and Edward O. Wilson, 173– 200. Washington DC: Island Press, 1993, 175.

How to bring nature into your digital world: 2. Go online and escape the cold

How to bring nature into your digital world 2. Go online and escape the cold.

Santaluz Inlet, Second Life

Here’s an idea for Americans shivering through record-breaking ice and snow, and Brits suffering wide-spread winter rain and flooding: why not go online to escape the cold for a while?

If you’re freezing in the real world, try immersing yourself in the warmth of a virtual tropical paradise. For example, this cosy open air home at Santaluz Inlet in Second Life is pretty relaxing. You can rent it for just 7,850 Linden Dollars a week – that’s less than US$35. A bargain!

This property and many others are managed by Reach Isles, a virtual world land development and management company focusing on luxury living in Second Life. It caters for ‘those who prefer living on private islands without the lag and congestion of the Second Life mainland, at affordable prices with a flexible tier structure’.  And this particular location is ‘a great place for a home if you value things like natural beauty, privacy, and space’. Furthermore, ‘the island has all 4 sides open to the virtual ocean  – no other sims will EVER touch its borders’.

So next time you’re imprisoned by the miserable weather, don’t despair. There’s an easy escape. Just log on, don your virtual sarong, and warm up on your own tropical island. Enjoy!

How to bring nature into your digital world: 1. Build the passage of the day into your digital life (and ignore that fake story about the Tiananmen sunrise)

How to bring nature into your digital world: 1. Build the passage of the day into your digital life

At Dorset County Hospital in Dorchester, England, a patient lies awake watching the sun rise. She’s being treated in an isolation ward with limited window views, yet technology enables her to observe the changing hues just metres from her bed as the sun climbs into the sky. On the wall across from her bed, a live feed is being streamed from a webcam positioned on the roof of a castle a few miles away.

Not a substitute sunrise for the smog-smothered citizens of Beijing, but just one screen of a video ad for tourism in Shandong province.

Recently another digital sunrise has been in the news. The image, displayed on a giant screen in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, attracted worldwide attention when the Daily Mail presented it with the headline China starts televising the sunrise on giant TV screens because Beijing is so clouded in smog and asserted that “the city’s natural light-starved masses have begun flocking to huge digital commercial television screens across the city to observe virtual sunrises”. A poetic notion, but untrue. In fact, writes Paul Bischoff in Tech in Asia, “that sunrise was probably on the screen for less than 10 seconds at a time, as it was part of an ad for tourism in China’s Shandong province. The ad plays every day throughout the day all year round no matter how bad the pollution is. The photographer simply snapped the photo at the moment when the sunrise appeared.”

Why did this piece of untrue ‘news’ attract so much attention? Perhaps because the notion of a deliberately-engineered fake sunrise is what we expect to find in a world where we’re already feeling anxious about the possibility of encountering artificial nature and, just like Truman, not being able to spot the difference.

Watching the sun come up offers a deep sense of authenticity by connecting us to the daily turn of our world. It’s a reminder that we are part of a vast and unknowable but natural universe. The fact is that we love sunrises and we love to share them. Check out Google Images, which categorises them into sunrises at beaches, mountains, forests and farms, as well as providing thousands, if not millions, of sunrise images whose locations are, for the most part. pretty indistinguishable from each other. Another source of sunrise pics is the Flickr group Sunrises and Sunsets, which has over 20,000 members. This morning, as on most days, my local cafe on the south coast of England shared a photo of the sunrise along with an invitation to breakfast there. And even as I write this my friend Thilo Boeck, currently in Santiago, Chile, is busy posting his own personal sunrise in Facebook. I ‘liked’ them both, of course. We can’t get enough of sunrises, even when they arrive digitally rather than through the medium of our own eyes, out in the fresh air or through a bedroom window. I’m reminded that someone once told me how checking his email as soon as he woke up is his personal daily ‘cybersunrise’. 

A Room with a View. Auxiliary Nurse Lucy Woodward demonstrates Dorset County Hospital’s new £50,000 ‘Room with a view’ for cancer patients who have to spend long periods in ‘clean air’ isolation rooms. The unique project beams live pictures via a microwave link from a beauty spot several miles away. (Bournemouth News Agency)

Back to Dorset County Hospital, where Arts in Hospital manage a project called Room with a View. As I’ve explained in Technobiophilia, numerous studies have shown that pictures of nature can be as effective as the real thing in reducing stress and restoring well-being. This project was set up as a service to patients who might benefit from that kind of facility. It projects a live feed from one of two locations: a view from a camera on the roof of Kingston Maurward House, approximately three kilometres away, showing the gardens and the lake, and a different landscape captured from the roof of Brownsea Castle overlooking Poole Harbour. The images are transmitted to large LCD screens in two isolation rooms which are used for immuno-compromised patients with leukaemia and other blood cancers, who may have to remain in them for several weeks. During those terrible nights when a seriously ill patient lies awake in pain, or is afraid and cannot sleep, they can at least look forward to the arrival of the sun.

So what can we learn from the email ‘cybersunrise’, the fake ‘fake sunrise’ in Tiananmen Square, the millions of shared photos, and the hospital ward’s live video feed?

The lesson is that we should have confidence in our digital images and enjoy them without guilt. Sure, the Tiananmen Square picture turned out to be something different than we were led to believe – that is to say, it’s not government propaganda after all, but the film probably does, dare I say it, bring a ray of sunlight into the lives of Beijing citizens. The city smog is inexcusable, but the image of the sun coming up in Shandong province is really quite beautiful. The live stream in a hospital room doesn’t have the smells and sounds of the real thing, but it offers relaxation and perhaps even pain relief. And the pictures we snap and share with our friends when we’ve risen early and captured something gorgeous – well, why not?

“Good morning. This is what I just woke up to.” Sunrise in Santiago, Chile. 22 Jan 2014. Photo: Thilo Boeck

The first tip, therefore, in this series on How to bring nature into your digital world is this:

Build the passage of the day into your digital life. Choose the best sunrises, the most evocative dusks. Photograph them, share them. Set aside a moment to gaze at them.  And if you already know of a gorgeous picture app or desktop application which follows the day from one sunrise to the next, especially with a live feed, please share it. Enjoy the digital dawn.

How to bring nature into your digital world

Samsung Galaxy S4 desktop wallpaper

I’m starting a collection of ways to bring nature into your personal digital world – stories, tips, and experiments.

The emphasis will be on the practical – what we might do, how we might do it, and which places, materials, apps and designs would help us

Please contact me with your own practical suggestions, tips or stories.  I’d love to hear from you.

Follow the winding path of the collection at my Twitter account @suethomas and via How to bring nature into your digital world.

I’ll also be sharing it at Medium.

And here is the first post: Build the passage of the day into your digital life (and ignore that fake story about the Tiananmen sunrise)