FutureObs

How do you build research tools for a field situation that only exists once? FutureObs is a design-research project studying human impact on marine ecosystems across three French coastal territories. The main design contribution is the development of a paper device for workshops and an internal Remotion tool that generates participant-facing videos — a specific research situation requiring both a physical participation format and a custom media-production pipeline.

FutureObs studies human presence and environmental impact on marine ecosystems through participatory workshops. The project connected people from different maritime territories in France to discuss environmental change, ecological pressure, and the gap between media representations of marine environments and lived experience. The work combined a paper participation device with a custom internal video-generation tool: researchers maintained a Google Sheet database of social media content, and the Remotion tool transformed that data into videos used as workshop touchpoints.

Three workshops ran in Rochefort, Marseille, and Dunkerque, each anchored in the local maritime ecosystem. Rochefort’s context was the Charente estuary and oyster farming; Marseille’s was the Calanques and Mediterranean tourism pressure; Dunkerque’s was the North Sea industrial coast and fishing communities.

Each workshop gathered around a dozen participants, all connected to the maritime ecosystem of their territory: oyster farmers, port workers, municipal environmental officers, marine biology students, and coastal residents. Each workshop had its own custom set of videos — produced from social media content specifically curated for that territory — and its own paper devices adapted to the local context. Everything was photographed and recorded to provide a UX basis for later analysis. The audio recordings, paper traces, and facilitator notes from each workshop formed the core research archive.

The paper device is the primary workshop interface. It structures how participants encounter video stimuli, record their impressions, and produce research traces that can be compared across territories.

The format is a printed A3 sheet folded to A4. The front face presents workshop instructions and a structured response grid; the back face carries contextual framing about the territory. Each participant receives one sheet per video prompt. The grid asks participants to position their response along three axes: level of concern about environmental change, perceived gap between media representation and personal experience, and attribution of responsibility (individual, institutional, systemic). Responses are captured as marks on continuous scales — deliberately avoiding multiple-choice or Likert-style questions — with a short written justification below each axis.

The paper format was chosen over a digital interface for three reasons: it requires no devices or connectivity in remote workshop settings; it lets participants see their own marks accumulating across prompts without switching screens; and it produces physical traces that can be photographed and archived as-is, without transcription.

The data used to create both the videos and the paper devices for each workshop were manually collected by researchers across different social networks. From there, they entered the production pipeline, becoming both structured videos using an internal tool (next section), and paper artifacts, using InDesign’s datamerge capabilities.

On the other side, all the data collected during the workshop — everything said, written, and done — was funneled into an internal dataset. This base of qualitative data was combined with oceanographic research and data analysis. The final structured dataset bridged the purely objective data from social scraping with the qualitative reactions of workshop participants.

The video tool connects a researcher-maintained Google Sheet to Remotion compositions, producing territory-specific video prompts for each workshop. Researchers populated the sheet as a content database: each row was a video prompt with columns for territory, theme, source platform, and framing text. The Remotion pipeline read the sheet via API, mapped each row to a video template — full-bleed background media with a semi-transparent overlay carrying the prompt title, territory label, and source attribution — and rendered MP4 outputs.

The tool was built for FutureObs specifically. It was not a general-purpose video generator: the sheet structure mirrored the research protocol, the composition parameters mapped to workshop needs, and the output format matched the facilitator’s playback setup. Data entry, visual generation, export, and workshop use formed a single workflow with no handoff between tools. Color accents in the overlay changed per territory — blue for Rochefort, green for Marseille, ochre for Dunkerque — giving facilitators an immediate visual cue for which prompt belonged to which site.