Stephanie Smith: You often use large banners as a means to convey your ideas. Why?

Nils Norman: I use the computer graphics program Adobe Illustrator to make digital drawings that can be easily enlarged or reduced to pretty much any size without losing resolution. So postcards, leaflets, posters, banners, digital wallpapers, and billboards are very simple and fast to produce, making it a mobile, autonomous, and immediate way of working. I usually look at the site where the work will be exhibited, taking into consideration budget, architecture, type of exhibition, outside space, city space, etc., and then try and formulate an appropriate format that will work within those parameters. I am trying to explore the idea of these projects being forms of propaganda in terms of aesthetics and content.

SS: The wooden structures that you depict in the back of your mural for Beyond Green remind me of the adventure playgrounds that you documented in your book An Architecture of Play: A Survey of London's Adventure Playgrounds (2004). (Adventure playgrounds are neighborhood playscapes built in vacant lots in London beginning after World War II and often designed by, or in close collaboration with, children.) How do the adventure playgrounds relate to the other images gathered into this work?

Nils Norman: Over the past four years, I've researched adventure playgrounds as well as makeshift architecture and ideas that revolve around the concept of "Non-Plan" planning. Non-Plan is an idea that was floating around in the 1970s and 1980s that experimented with the idea of taking a city area and removing all planning regulations, enabling local people to design and build whatever they wanted. It was seen by many as a highly conservative approach to planning, but its links to the squatters' movement and the idea of autonomous zones is very interesting. I have come to see adventure playgrounds as radical models of alternative public space-playful spaces of disruption, disorder, and undevelopment in direct opposition to the relentless privatization and dismal redevelopment of every sad scrap of urban space. Manhattan, for example, is still a vibrant and diverse city space. However, Business Improvement Districts (a form of privatization and gentrification in which the government creates partnerships with the private sector that are designed to improve business in different city areas) and other private initiatives have radically altered the city's character; it has become more homogenous, with less disruptive space.

SS: One of the central images in the banner you are designing for Beyond Green is a bus that you imagine transformed into a sustainably powered research vehicle. Could you talk about how this idea fits into your prior designs for research vehicles? For instance, do you hope to actually construct and use the Public Space Research Vehicle as you did the Geocruiser (2001), which started as drawings, plans, and models but was eventually built through a commission by the Institute of Visual Arts in London?

NN: The research vehicles I have been designing are mainly fantasies. A couple of years back, I went on a research tour related to the Lebens Reform (Life Reform) movement, traveling with my friend, the German artist Stephan Dillemuth. This was a movement that formally began around the mid 1890s. It was a reach toward a new way of living, a kind of proto-hippy experiment that encompassed many things to do with health, nutrition, dwelling, and clothing. They were the early vegetarians, naturists, and organic farmers. We toured museums, historical commune sites, farms, garden cities, and archives from Hagen in northern Germany to Lago Maggiore in Italy. We drove around in a very small sports car, and if we had had a hydrogen-powered, mobile live-in workstation, our trip would have been perfect.

The Public Space Research Vehicle is really just a proposal; I'm more interested in the ideas and research rather than the vehicle itself. The vehicle is just a framing device through which to view the content: uses of public space and the history of U.S. utopian experiments in agriculture, economies, and communal living.

SS: If you were to use the Public Space Research Vehicle, what sites would you visit? What kinds of utopian communities are you most interested in these days?

NN: I would visit all the utopian communities I could find, from the Earthships in New Mexico to Brook Farm, Massachusetts. Garden city experiments and urban farming initiatives would also be important stops, as well as any remaining squatted buildings in the U.S.