Taking to the open road with their Future Mundane Caravan, a team from Lancaster University hopes to give hundreds of people the chance to directly experience how they might live with more ‘smart’ products and services which increasingly use Artificial Intelligence and Data to improve their operation.

ImaginationLancaster, the design-led research laboratory at Lancaster University, will travel to be at Salford Media City from 9 to 13 May, the Bath Digital Festival from 10 to 14 July, and at the popular Bluedot music, science and culture event at Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire, from 20 to 23 July.

The caravan will house ImaginationLancaster’s experiential futures, exploring Artificial Intelligence and Data including activities such as the Edge of Reality, which explores the sustainability and cybersecurity aspects of our increasingly connected homes.

Visitors immerse themselves in the caravan’s ‘living room of the future’ that incorporates an array of both real and fictional devices and services. The interactive experiences they encounter use speculative design techniques to help make the growing societal and environmental impacts of data generated by smart devices and online services.

“Often considered harmless because we cannot see it, the tsunami of data flowing between our devices and the Cloud is contributing to climate change, as well as introducing new cybersecurity vulnerabilities,” explains Professor Paul Coulton, of ImaginationLancaster.

They aim to demonstrate the need for future smart technologies to be designed in a way that gives users greater agency, by making it clearer what data is being collected, how it is being used, and who has access to it.

“The edge of reality experience seeks to emphasise the collective need to improve data sustainability – just like there is to increase plastic recycling and adopt more eco-friendly forms of travel,” added Professor Coulton.