Owning the Sky

As I write this, an inebriated off-duty government intelligence agent has just sent his DJI Phantom crashing into the White House, causing the private drone company to issue a mandatory firmware update that immediately disabled all camera drones in Washington D.C.’s no-fly zone. All this just a few weeks after a drone outfitted with mistletoe flew into a photojournalist’s face, bloodying her nose and chin.¹

Interest in drones is growing faster than any ­­regulatory framework around their use, from NASA’s hurricane-hunting drones to methane-sniffing, anti-fracking drones; from larger corporate beasts such as Google’s Project Wing,² Amazon’s Prime Air delivery service³ and Facebook’s solar drones to the more altruistic ventures such as the Drones for Good Award;⁴ and from the critical voices of the Centre for the Study of the Drone⁵ and Drone Journalism Lab⁶ to the hugely popular DIYdrones.com.⁷

The word “drone” is a complex, heavily loaded term. It is simultaneously a mascot of risk-transfer militarism and an artifact of celebrity obsession, a tool for important journalistic endeavors⁸ and a DIY enthusiast’s dream. The last couple of years have seen a prodigious rise in civilian drones with venture capital funding for drone-related startups totaling $412 million in 2014. Ruth Mallors, director of the UK Aerospace Knowledge Transfer Network, estimates that the value of all potential services provided by drones could exceed $400 billion a year.

While there is a rather overwhelming excitement around civilian drones, the technology remains “a moving target of invention and boundary-testing making it almost impossible to create legal and cultural boundaries quickly enough.”⁹ For instance, both the Federal Aviation Association (FAA) and Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) have changed the law around the weight, size and type of drone allowed to fly in civil space several times in the last two years. The FAA has most recently suggested that drones are permitted to fly only within line of sight. Meanwhile the technology that enables drones to fly safely when out of sight has developed rapidly. With little systematic contemplation on how the presence and increasing autonomy of these machines will change our lived experience of the urban environment, our research hypothesizes that cities will need to develop resilient and thoughtful strategies to build supporting digital infrastructures that are mutable and non-intrusive.

And that is precisely the ambition of our Drone Aviary project: to explore the physical, digital, spatial and civic complexities of this technology. The Drone Aviary is a research and design project from our London-based studio Superflux, and investigates the social, political and cultural potential of drone technology as it enters civil space. Through an ongoing series of installations, films and publications, the project aims to give a glimpse into a near-future city cohabiting with “intelligent” semi autonomous, networked, flying machines.¹⁰

In its current form, the project contains a flock of five archetypal drones. Each drone is designed to symbolize the convergence of wider social and technological trends with specific tasks and functions gaining popularity amongst drone enthusiasts and entrepreneurs. We arrived at these archetypes based on various research insights, which revealed that governments, entrepreneurs and investors have shown significant interest and investment in particular themes of security and surveillance, traffic management, social media, advertising and journalism. We looked at the history of unmanned aerial vehicles, the state of current technical development and what is under development for the near future—as well as the broader cultural and social trends to understand what other forces might start to intersect and influence future development.  This information was then mapped out using a variety of tools and methods to start the creative process of extrapolating scenarios, a process we often call “futurescaping.”

The drones are the protagonists in this scenario—they reveal their own fleeting glimpses of the city as they continuously collect data and perform tasks. The scenario hints at a world where the “network” begins to gain physical autonomy, moving through and making decisions about the world, influencing our lives in opaque yet profound ways.

Madison, The Flying Billboard: This is the advertising drone, a hovering display platform, which can swoop, scan and hunt consumer demographics. It uses sophisticated facial recognition to gain feedback on the effectiveness of its content and to tailor advertisements to the interests of those in its vicinity.

Newsbreaker, The Media Drone: Supported by algorithmic news monitoring, emergency services and social media in real-time, these nimble devices push the boundaries for high frequency journalism—feeding our growing hunger for the latest breaking news story as it happens. As the drone films and streams news in real-time, its story writing algorithms parse imagery, audio, web and radio traffic into rapidly growing, and continually edited, column inches.

Nightwatchman, The Surveillance Drone: A highly mobile data acquisition device used by everyone from local councils to law enforcement agencies. Securely connected to a centralized database, the Nightwatchman amasses and utilizes huge amounts of location and subject specific information—assisting in everything from the documentation of civil offences to the detection of potential terror threats.

RouteHawk, Traffic Management Assistant: This drone fulfills two primary functions: first, with its high brightness LED display and powerful eight motor design, the RouteHawk can quickly move to problem situations and provide dynamic warnings to approaching drivers. Second, its LIDAR speed detector and ANPR camera allow the drone to efficiently log and transmit traffic violations to relevant penalty enforcement departments, often allowing a unit to pay for itself within a month.

FlyCam Instadrone: A highly accessible, low cost, user-friendly platform with true “smart” style functionality. Quickly superseding the Selfie stick as today’s must-have life-logging and social media tool, the FlyCam allows anyone with a smartphone to share unforgettable memories from the cloud using the Instadrone app. Additionally, its patented context aware algorithm lets advertisers deliver messages to customers when and where it counts.

Each drone that we have developed serves as a touchpoint, a hook or a node that represents a deeper theme, issue or concern. With tales of market-driven opportunism, infrastructure, surveillance and data collection, each drone’s micro-narrative is a plausible sketch of how drones might inflect social interactions and culture while buzzing across cityscapes.

Our approach is to present messy, complex, uncertain worlds. Superflux is less interested in suggesting what is good or bad, and more interested in showing the various possibilities and unintended consequences of this technology. Whilst we obviously take a position, and have decided to focus on certain points of view and on a certain kind of data collection, our goal is to let the viewer interpret and reflect on the work.

The five drones explore how deeply entwined our lives have become with artificial intelligence and large-scale autonomous systems, often unknowingly so.

It was important that the design and the aesthetic of each drone represent the themes that their functions represent, whilst inevitably becoming an integral part of a consumer landscape. Every aspect of each drone was specifically built and designed to consciously and deliberately move beyond the off-the-shelf “machine” or “hacked” and “DIY” aesthetic. This decision was based on the current state of play around civilian drones. Most drones built by people had a very “hacked” aesthetic, while drones presented as “products” appeared to be rendered, rather then real. We decided to build and present our drones as “products,” which are real and exist in the world, to reference the ways in which beautifully designed products and seductive user experience often obfuscate the technology and its intent.

The Superflux team spent vast amounts of time getting under the hood of existing technology, building and testing several drones in order to understand the limits of (hacked) possibility. We are not drone or robotics experts—we are designers (jugaad¹⁰ practitioners, if you will) with enough skills and expertise to understand the complexities of this technology and test its limits. This process of making, building, hacking, testing and innovating is important: only through this rigorous process is one able to understand the enormous disconnect between the hype and the ground-level reality of the technology. In our work, we use design methods to investigate, imagine, build and communicate ways in which emerging technologies influence and shape our lived realities (today and in the near future) by producing tangible, experiential and provocative visions.

PROJECT INTENT AND PROCESS
“Autonomous robots will displace our sense of control precisely because they are out of our control, but [they] occupy the physical world and demand our attention.” Illah Nourbaksh

We walked over from the studio to Southwark Park, where Jon placed his drone down in the middle of the expansive patch of grass. He walked a few steps backwards, holding the controller.  Seven of us stood right behind him. While Dan held his laptop, I stood ready to film the moment. Jonathan and Dillon were holding spare props and batteries. Sam had his headphones on, ready to listen to the input from his audio recorder.

Whooooosh, easy lift off. The propeller blades cut through the grass as the drone soared up into the sky, gently steering left all the way to the end of the park, then right, then back towards us, marking a perfect square. Standing in a row, we cheered as the drone we built completed its first fully autonomous flight. It was exhilarating—the first step towards testing the RTK swift system—and we talked excitedly about getting five to ten drones flying autonomously in outdoor space, talking to one central system at once.

But just then, instead of landing where it was supposed to, the drone began to accelerate and fly towards us. Everyone screamed, rushing back. And then almost as abruptly, it averted, flipped, raced backwards and gently landed a few yards away. Someone let out a sigh. A nervous laugh followed. Jon turned around and said, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.” He had noticed the flight going wrong, and had taken control of the remote just in time. That ever-so-brief moment of horror on the faces of those technologists, makers, designers and artists will remain an acute memory. Even those of us who build and play with technology, those most equipped to deal with surprises, were left shaken, if only for a fraction of a second.

We could have bought off-the-shelf drones and got them to operate and fly for the original installation, but it was too expensive. We were forced to build everything from scratch—the frames and the drone brain (the autopilot system)—as well as assemble and make sure it would survive flight. The project’s focus has been on outdoor flight in order to understand the potential and limitations of autonomous flight in an environment where drones will eventually fly—rather than indoors, with infrared cameras and sensors to guide them. When a machine has varying degrees of autonomy, it has the capacity to start performing functions on its own without supervision, which can be very useful. For instance, autonomous underwater robots are used for survey missions to detect and map submerged wrecks, rocks and obstructions that pose a hazard to navigation for commercial and recreational vessels. A fully autonomous machine will likely operate knowing that it is responsible for its own actions, and that its “moral principles” will guide its behaviour. When such autonomous machines start making decisions based on the data they collect, several questions are raised. How those decisions are made, who benefits from them and what the consequences are remain unknown. This is a complex and messy space that needs further work.

Our aim is to better explore and understand this space in order to invent, design, critique and disseminate it. Through this process we have also learned how to move past the current lack of interoperability towards the design of a common operating system, encompassing both hardware and software.

CARTOGRAPHIES OF THE SKY
We hope to investigate the technology not just as a “machine” with all its technical capabilities, but to explore the vision it will have, the space and geography it will occupy, the network it will operate within, the physical and digital infrastructures it will use and the legal and regulatory frameworks that bind it.

“Cartographies of the Sky” is a double-sided poster that maps the vertical geographies and digital infrastructures that cities will need in order to accommodate civilian drones. From restricted zones to geofences, flight paths to charging stations, the speculative map on one side looks at how our airspace may become divided and occupied in the years to come. The other side captures the project’s thematic concerns around our changing relationships to algorithmic intelligence and increasingly autonomous machines.  The map will continue to respond to the shifts and changes in legal and regulatory frameworks. In fact, it is currently impossible to make any sort of accurate diagram, as the technology itself is a moving target of invention.

THE (MACHINE) VISION
“The communications breakthroughs of the past two decades have multiplied the connections within society, but drones offer something else: the conquest of physical space, the extension of society’s compass, the ability to be anywhere and see anything.” Benjamin Wallace-Wells

One of the biggest challenges to building the drones was figuring out how they will defy gravity and fly. Once they do, the distance between us and the airspace collapses completely. The drone becomes a new kind of disembodied prosthetic, allowing us to watch over the world with a little controller. Extreme acclivity can be exhilarating. It can make you feel both alone and unrivalled. But it can also be terrifying, as the drone can be erratic—either because of your own incompetence or technical failure—damaging and destroying expensive equipment and causing harm or injury to people and property.

Whatever the pros and cons, once you have this air-minded vantage point, you enter a position of strategic advantage and strength—a position that eludes to the magical effect of the pale blue dot, the overview effect and the change in cognitive ability: “drones can democratize the overview effect. The scale is obviously magnitudes smaller but the principle is the same. They remind us that the truly remarkable thing is not looking up to marvel at the technology of a balloon or airplane or spaceship, it’s really what happens when you are up, and looking down.”¹¹

While this might be true, we also know that this vision becomes more than an adventure sport, more than a breathtaking view. Seeing the world through the drone’s eye is powerful. And that is because drones are, most importantly, data-acquisition devices: “all drones carry the burden that comes with being an instrument of tremendous power. It is the vantage point they offer, it is the data they collect from that vantage point, and it is the power afforded by that data.”¹² They are sensors that can capture, record, transmit, share, save and even make decisions. As seen in our film “Drone Aviary,” based on the collected data, drones might be able to levy parking fines, override privacy clauses, make arrests and sell personal data to third parties without consent. As civilian drones become tasked with chores and functions, they will necessarily carry more sensors and gain further autonomy. This shift will be bumpy, full of bugs and crashes, but a paradigm shift nonetheless. A shift that will bring with it a new language and vocabulary, and in this instance a new optics, which will lead to a new politics of power between human and non-human species.¹³

Whilst not all drones harness their sensor power for monitoring or surveillance purposes, they will all have this vantage point and gain informational power as they operate in this abstract communicational space. When the network is digital and invisible it appears magical and people (consumers and end users) remained unchallenged. But what happens when it starts to become visible and gain physical form? What will our relationship to it be, and how will we interpret its actions? Those who own the systems that breathe life into this informational power are the ones who become the most powerful. This, in turn, has already given rise to a new kind of networked colonialism.

In the film, every drone’s point of view is presented through a series of video feeds—the data they acquire and the metadata they create. This drone vision glimpses the banality of its tasks: capturing, recording and logging data; its capacity to form patterns and infer decisions, and its inevitable clumsiness and fragility. It is an attempt to present a world in which the motivations haven’t changed. Advertisers still want to sell cans of Coca-Cola, traffic wardens are still scouting cars for parking fees; tasks that seem too mundane and perhaps even too repetitive to hand themselves over to these flying robots. There is lot going on in the film, and repeated viewings start to reveal new layers. For instance, how geofencing width might actually vary across buildings. Real estate value is measured in actual brick and mortar today, but if geofencing boundaries become important, then real estate prices will include the invisible geofences that surround buildings. Housing prices will depend on the depth of the geofence—the wider the invisible fence surrounding the building, the less chance there is of a drone hitting a window. While luxurious high-rises could probably afford deeper geofences, the lesser blessed would instead be forced to live with narrow boundaries to protect them. In the advertising sequence in the film, you’ll notice someone who has an “access denied” block. This imagination assumes anonymity will become a luxury, an expensive service you pay for.

Video footage of the city captured from these drones is juxtaposed with our own trials and tests to build and fly them. The film aims to present the shifts in power created by the technology, from surveillance drones to personal (insta) drones, to reveal the messy, multilayered social, legal, economic and cultural narratives constantly being written around them.

THE (AIR)SPACE THEY OCCUPY
“We talk about atmosphere, stratosphere, airspace. But none of the words say much about the porousness between the rooftops and the clouds, the bit of the sky we breathe, walk through, and look out upon.” J.M Ledgerd

With developments in autonomous flight control software and changing regulations, the air above our heads could get crowded, and comments like this¹⁴ will become increasingly common. When we talk about civic space as a physical entity, we rarely talk about the space above our heads. This is in part because of the (somewhat) naive belief that the belt between our heads and airplanes is public domain.¹⁵ After all, we fly kites and go paragliding. However, ownership of airspace has become a messy battlefield—from common law,¹⁶ where real property¹⁷ ownership extended “from the depths to the heavens,”¹⁸ to the infamous United States v. Causby (1946)¹⁹ airspace and the Bernstein of Leigh v. Skyview & General (1978).²⁰

For every aspect of the drone’s use, a different legal body will be required to take action. While the airspace is heavily regulated by FAA in the US, the five hundred feet above our head is also being eyed by entrepreneurs and drone companies who want to claim a slice of it. Bigger companies like Facebook and Google are already using public airspace as real estate in the high-stakes competition for Internet domination. In the UK too, the CAA is attempting to achieve more granularity in its laws, which at the moment are very fuzzy. However, this is where it becomes more complicated.²¹ The CAA’s focus is purely safety. There have been several incidents, especially in the US, where drones that are hovering above someone’s property, have been shot down.

COUNTERMEASURES
As this battle for air rights takes on new meaning thanks to civilian drones (UAVs), the countermeasures around it do too: “unlike more traditional hacking scenarios, the consequences of a drone being compromised can be both digital and physical.”²² Jamming, spoofing²³ and other countermeasures to combat these aerial machines are well documented. The politics and counter-politics of being tracked, along with the pseudo-power afforded by a jamming “smart drone,” is in some ways the tragic irony of our times.

NEW (INVISIBLE) INFRASTRUCTURES
The question of territoriality and airspace leads to a bigger discussion around the infrastructure required by these airborne machines. Whilst our invisible communication networks (through the drones) are given physical form, the infrastructure to support them is vastly invisible and digital. In March of 2015, the FAA approved Amazon’s permission request to test its Prime Air service,²⁴ on the basis that the company use geofencing to keep the drone in an “electronic box” below four hundred feet. The Phantom DJI ’s No Fly Zone system²⁵ is a curious technological and sovereignty precedent—the system, which initially created a geofence that prevented the flight of all Phantoms within a fifteen kilometre radius of Tiananmen Square in Beijing, has now been extended to three hundred and fifty airports. This practice is slowly becoming the norm—with the no-fly zone over Washington D.C. established in January 2015, and the Phantom DJI No Fly Zone,²⁶ which invited members of the public to submit their location data to let private drone manufacturers know that they do not want drones flying above their heads. This kind of remote firmware update is also beginning to filter into other sectors. For instance, in October 2015, Tesla delivered an autopilot mode to its cars, so owners suddenly found that their cars could drive themselves. There are two equally frightening aspects to such an update. First, you no longer have any control on how the gadget or product you buy might behave in the future, and second, the opportunities for remote hacking become easier and more tempting than ever before.

All of this opens up a can of worms. Like so much technology, thought is given to its use, while all other repercussions and implications remain unanswered. How do we imagine this playing out? How willing are we to give our GPS locations to a private company that can share it with whomever they like? In regards to geofencing, how willing are we to buy something knowing that its functionality may constantly change or diminish? And what about the hundreds and thousands of homemade drones that will never obey the geofencing rules laid out by private manufacturers?

Beyond large corporate ventures, the civilian drone industry is booming with gadget lovers buying off-the-shelf technology and with DIY enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, public sector and non-governmental ventures investing in it. As all these drones take to the sky, what are the vertical, digital infrastructural capabilities that cities need to equip themselves with? What sort of legal and regulatory frameworks will need to be developed? This is already a contentious issue that will become even messier unless some careful systems design is undertaken immediately.

There is an immediate need to investigate this technology in all its pros and cons. As drones become cheaper to buy and easier to build, there will certainly be a “democratizing” effect—more and more people will gain this overview effect. But on the other hand, we also know that if you are not paying for it you are the product. The more we allow off-the-shelf drones to enter our homes and our lives, these more these cheap, toy-like pets, could become versions of the Instadrone,²⁷ allowing anyone with a smartphone to share unforgettable memories from the cloud using the Instadrone app. Whilst this scenario is democratizing, it might also be another instance in which our personal data is a currency used in exchange for these technologies.

Rules across the world are rapidly changing—a constant political and commercial negotiation between businesses and regulators with little input from the wider public. Superflux is concerned with what invisible digital infrastructures these networked autonomous machines will bring into our urban environment, and the new forms of power and control that it will demand.  In years to come, we will inadvertently feel the impact of these infrastructures on our daily lives as we move about the city. Questions related to ownership of the sky and common public civic spaces will become more relevant than ever before.

Superflux is very interested in this dark matter. We are creating (speculative) sketches and designs of this dark, invisible architecture—flight paths, zones, geofences and weight restrictions—and infrastructure that would support drones to fly, speculating how the city might be divided.

Through extensive research, prototyping, and communication this project has showcased a technology’s potential and unintended consequences to a wide range of audiences—from exhibition goers, to entrepreneurs, policymakers, manufacturers, students and technologists. As a design studio, this means we now have the opportunity to bring critical thought to mainstream audiences and hopefully have a wider impact on design, policy and legal frameworks.

Moving forward, we will continue to look for a venue with an open space where our drones can fly—moving through the feet of visitors, giving a visceral, tangible experience of what it might be like to interact with these flying machines. Whilst the flight is not critical to our work, we do believe the tangibility of the flight experience will play a bigger role in provoking thought and reflection on the actual technology and its implications. Meanwhile we will continue to develop work in this space and expand to include other autonomous technologies to better understand their changing relationships to us and the lived environment.

1. 1. Hugh Merwin, “A TGI Fridays Mistletoe Drone Collided With a Journalist’s Face,” Grub Street, December 2014, http://www.grubstreet.com/2014/12/tgi-fridays-mobile-misteltoe.html. ^
2. 2. Jack Stewart, “Google tests drone deliveries in Project Wing trials,” August 2014, BBC News, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-28964260. ^
3. 3. Charles Author, “Amazon seeks US permission to test Prime Air delivery drones,” The Guardian, July 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/11/amazon-prime-air-delivery-drones. ^
4. 4. See https://www.dronesforgood.ae/. ^
5. 5. See http://dronecenter.bard.edu/. ^
6. 6. See http://www.dronejournalismlab.org/. ^
7. 7. See http://diydrones.com/ ^
8. 8. See https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1926278254/drone-on-the-farm-an-aerial-expose. ^
9. 9. See http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~illah/. ^
10. 10. We were pleased to be invited by the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) to present an installation of the project within the Civic Objects display at their groundbreaking show “All Of This Belongs To You,” which ran from 1st April to 19th July 2015. The installation at the V&A contains a family of five drones and an accompanying film. The project was shown as an installation at the Victoria and Albert Museum as part of the show All of This Belongs To You. The project travelled to around the world to FabMind, 21_21 Design Sight in Tokyo, Globale Infosphere at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany and then STUK in Leuven, Belgium. ^
11. 11. http://www.virgin.com/unite/business-innovation/democratizing-the-overview-effect, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect. ^
12. 12. Chris Anderson, “Democratizing the overview effect,” Virgin website, http://www.virgin.com/unite/business-innovation/democratizing-the-overview-effect; and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect. ^
13. 13. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowleges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 575-599. https://faculty.washington.edu/pembina/all_articles/Haraway1988.pdf. ^
14. 14. Anderson, “How Will We Live With Drones?”. ^
15. 15. Steve Henn, “Drone Wars: Who Owns The Air?” Morning Edition, http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/05/30/317074394/drone-wars-who-owns-the-air. ^
16. 16. “Common Law,” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, accessed May 2016, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law. ^
17. 17. “Real Property,”Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, accessed May 2016, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_property. ^
18. 18. “Cuius est solum, eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos,” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, accessed May 2016, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_coelum. ^
19. 19. “United States v. Causby” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, accessed May 2016, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Causby. ^
20. 20. “Bernstein of Leigh v Skyviews & General Ltd,” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, accessed May 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_of_Leigh_v_Skyviews_%26_General_Ltd. ^
21. 21. Tom De Castella, “Where you can and can’t fly a drone,” BBC News Magazinehttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-30387107. ^
22. 22. See https://thealpinereview.com/article/the-drones-economy/. ^
23. 23. Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, “GPS Hacking Catches FEDS, Drone Makers Off Guard,” July 2012, http://www.wired.com/2012/07/drone-gps-spoof/all/. ^
24. 24. Jeff Roberts, “Amazon asks FAA to test Prime Air, says drones will go over 50mph with “geo-fence” for safety,” Gigaom, July 2014, http://gigaom.com/2014/07/11/amazon-asks-faa-to-test-prime-air-says-drones-will-go-over-50mph-with-geo-fence-for-safety/. ^
25. 25. “DJI Programmes Phantom with No-Fly Zones Around 350 Airports,” UAS Vision, April 2014, http://www.uasvision.com/2014/04/15/dji-programmes-phantom-with-no-fly-zones-around-350-airports/. ^
26. 26. See https://www.noflyzone.org/. ^
27. 27. See http://www.superflux.in/work/drone-aviary. ^

Anab Jain is a designer, filmmaker and co-founder of Superflux, a critically acclaimed design studio working in the realm of emerging technologies for business, cultural, and social purposes. Her work has won awards from Apple, UNESCO, ICSID and Innovate UK and been exhibited at MoMA, V&A and National Museum of China amongst others.

Jon Ardern is an artist, designer and co-founder of Superflux, a critically acclaimed design studio working in the realm of emerging technologies for business, cultural, and social purposes. His work has been exhibited at the MoMA New York, V&A, Science Gallery amongst others, and has won awards from UNESCO and New York’s Social Design Network.

We would like to thank Arts Council England for their generous support throughout this project. We would also like to thank the V&A, especially the All Of This Belongs To You team Kieron Long, Corinna Gardner, Rory Hyde, Kate Drummond and Jennie Llyod-Evans for inviting us to show the work.

This project has involved several exceptionally talented people over the course of the past year and it’s been a humbling experience to work with them:

Project Leads: Jon Ardern and Anab Jain
Design and Prototyping: Jon Flint, Jon Ardern, Dillon Froelich, Ian Hutchinson, DOME Studio
Film Script and Direction: Anab Jain
Visual Designers: Katarina Medic, Georgina Bourke
Motion Designers: Dimitris Papadimitriou, Laurence Mencé, Alexandra Fruhstorfer
Sound Designers: Sam Conran, Ian Rawes
Technologists: Jon Ardern, Dan Williams, Mike Vanis, Philipp Ronnenberg
Still Photography: Owen Richards, Jon Flint, Jon Ardern, Anab Jain
Drone Fictions: Tim Maughan
Acknowledgements: Yosuke Ushigome, David Benque, Elvira Grob, Gejin Gao, Tobias Revell, Anuradha Reddy, Sarah Gold, Lisa Shakespeare, Carolina Vallejo, Martin and Mariko