In the end of March, the City of Malmö hosted a meeting with delegates from the network Cities for Children. The aim of this European network is to offer cities the possibility to exchange, and develop progressive concepts across national borders on how to promote the well-being of children, young persons and parents in the urban environment.

In connection to the meeting Unsworn Industries organised a panorama workshop with a focus on developing multi-functional outdoor environments for children as well as office workers. The goal of the workshop was not only to discuss design matters, but also to get the chance to try out, and experiment with a new kind of tool for prototype-oriented city development, and citizen-dialogue - that is, the Parascope.

One hour panorama workshop
The set-up of the panorama workshop is based upon experiences made, and learnings gained from previous panorama workshops, e.g. in Gothenburg in collaboration with the Ingrepp research group, in Alnarp at the Movium conference, or in Nydala in collaboration with Medea.

The design brief handed out to the workshop participants was:
Re-design the yard outside the City hall into a multi-functional outdoor space to be used by kindergarten children, civil servants, and the general public.

The actual site they were to re-design was located just outside the window where the workshop took place. One hour was the impossibly short amount of time they had to their disposal to come up with a design proposal. The participants were working in groups of four, and visualised, tested, re-tested their proposals by sketching, drawing collages on panoramic images of the physical site. The panoramas they produced were digitalised, and uploaded on-line, as well as into a Parascope for swift comparison on-site, outdoors on the yard

Despite the tight workshop schedule, time-wise speakting, there were some very interesting ideas, and design-proposals developed. The workshop participants stated that they clearly could see benefits of applying this methodology in urban planning processes. They saw potentials in using the Parascope, and organising panorama workshops both when it comes to collaborative design processes involving urban planners and citizens, as well as when communicating ideas, and forthcoming changes.

Malmö´s Western Harbour area sports a number of state-of-the-art, sustainable solutions for its energy, waste and water systems. These systems are mostly invisible to the untrained eye. Visual storyteller Arlene Birt created a “Behind the scenes” panorama for a Parascope during her residency at Medea.

“Wow, I’ve lived here for three years and I still didn’t have a clue how it all works”, exclaimed one of the locals.

Magnus calibrates the Parascope for perfect alignment with the Turning Torso.

Fowl-curious people gathered at the hugely popular Unsworn Visuals-designed Social Birding tent at Falsterbo Bird Show this weekend.

Perhaps you’re curious about birds (with wings) and bird-watching, but you don’t own a pair of tube binoculars and you’re unsure of how and where to direct your gaze? At Falsterbo Bird Show this weekend you could converse with bird experts while observing live video footage of circling sparrowhawks, honey buzzards, and hobbies on a large screen in a custom designed tent.

Other screens displayed Flickr photos and Twitter messages contributed by fellow festival participants.

Vital components of this Unsworn Social Birding setup are:

• a steady-handed, bearded cameraman with awesome optics
• an exhaustive bird image database ready-at-hand to pedagogically assist the conversation
• nimble google-fingers to conjure up images when the discussion meanders beyond the image database and turns to Chinese cormorant fishing or guano production
• daily film reports from the local bird ringing station
• 200 inches of plasma to fight of the bright sun outside

Stay tuned for more unsworn ornithological experiments!