Speculative Design|Book Design|Object Making|Editorial design
The Year With Many Summers
Year:2025
Medium:Aluminium
Size: 214cm*108cm
Project Type: Group Peoject
Book Design：Di Mao/ Huijun Liu
Installation Design：Di Mao
Aduino：Huijun Liu
Photo：Di Mao
Film：Di Mao
Tutors: Sarah|Isabel|Laura
Technical Tutors: Su
2025 Wehaveadog Exhibition , London
2025 LICC Award--Short List
2026 Photofairs Shanghai
In our project, we use temperature as the parameter to identify when summer has arrived, even if this falls outside the conventional date range. Using coded algorithms and environmental sensors, we capture surrounding temperature conditions and translate them into contextually relevant audio cues.
In London, the sound of an ice cream van is a familiar signal of summer. When the temperature reaches a certain threshold, our system triggers this sound. If the temperature exceeds 28°C on March 9th and March 19th, can that day be considered spring, or summer? Through this approach, we question the notion of fixed seasonal boundaries, presenting a dynamic, fluid concept of summer shaped by human experience and activity.
The year without summer
The project began with an interview-based research film exploring how people from different cultural backgrounds perceive the seasons. Participants were invited to talk about the number of seasons they experience, their duration, and the memories and everyday objects they associate with them.
The conversations revealed that the idea of "four seasons" is far from universal. Rather than treating seasons as fixed natural categories, the interviews suggested that seasonal perception is culturally constructed. These insights became the starting point for investigating the relationship between seasons, everyday artefacts, and sound throughout the project.
Building on the earlier research, we developed a temperature-responsive sound device to investigate whether the experience of summer could be triggered independently of the calendar.
The device continuously monitors the surrounding temperature. Once a predefined threshold is reached, it plays the familiar melody of a British ice cream van—a sound widely associated with the arrival of summer in the UK.
By reconnecting cultural signals with real-time environmental conditions, the device separates seasonal experience from calendar time. When the melody unexpectedly plays in March, many people instinctively interpret the moment as summer, despite it still being spring.
Rather than defining summer through dates, the installation demonstrates how seasonal perception is shaped by embodied memory, cultural association, and everyday sensory experience.
Rather than exhibiting the device in a gallery, we brought it into everyday urban environments to test the project in real situations.
The device was activated across locations including Barbican, Hyde Park, Greenwich Park and the London Underground, allowing us to observe how different environments and temperatures influenced people's perception of summer.
By moving the project into public space, the city itself became the testing ground. When the familiar melody of an ice cream van unexpectedly played in March, people often paused, searched for its source, and began questioning whether summer had already arrived.
These experiments demonstrated that seasonal perception is not determined by temperature alone, but emerges through the interaction between environmental conditions, cultural memory and shared social expectations.
The year with many summers
The project concludes with a research publication that brings together the entire investigation into a single narrative.
The publication combines interview transcripts, seasonal mappings, field experiments, observations and visual documentation, reconnecting materials generated throughout the project into a coherent research journey.
Rather than presenting a definitive conclusion, the book functions as an open research archive. It traces how an initial question about the universality of the seasons evolved into an exploration of cultural memory, environmental perception and everyday experience, inviting readers to reconsider how the idea of summer is constructed.