Scarborough Post-Human Regatta
2056 Marine Sport Festival

This project imagines Scarborough in 2056, a coastal town shaped by rising sea levels, stronger winter storms, and unstable seasonal rhythms. Because almost half of the town’s economy depends on tourism, these environmental changes create major uncertainty for everyday life.

The project begins with an interest in AI decision-making, especially the idea that AI should not replace human judgement but help interpret environmental data such as wave height, wind speed, and tide patterns. AI becomes a tool that supports human understanding rather than a system that controls behaviour.

In this future scenario, many residents and visitors use post-human or machine-enhanced bodies. These include improved balance systems, sensory implants, and stabilising body extensions that help people move safely along the changing coastline. Such enhancements are not exceptional technologies, but normal ways of adapting to a new environmental reality. These bodies also become the main users of the city’s new activity: the Surf Game.

The Surf Game transforms Scarborough’s shoreline into a public sport shaped directly by natural forces. Instead of treating surfing as a private leisure activity, the project reframes it as a competitive game where the rules come from the environment itself. Waves, tides, and seasonal conditions act as fixed boundaries that players must read and respond to. Following the ideas from Play Anything, the project sees play as a way of engaging with the world through its constraints. Players do not escape the environment they work with it. The challenge is not to control nature but to navigate it.

The aim of this project is to propose a new relationship between climate, technology, and human activity in Scarborough. By combining AI interpretation, post-human abilities, and the Surf Game, the project proposes a future where the coastline stays playable and accessible even as environmental conditions continue to change.