Dings, Data and North Sea Surfing
Discover how new kinds of data are being used to understand England’s surfing community.
North Sea Surfing
Say the word 'surfing' and the icy conditions of the North Sea don’t necessarily come to mind. However, this is home to a large community of cold water surfers.
Backline Pack (21st Century) by Jeremy GoffinUniversity of Lincoln: College of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
These men and women clad head to toe in rubber wetsuits brave these icy waters , all year round to do what they love most.
At the 'coal face' in Teeside community (21st Century) by Jeremy GoffinUniversity of Lincoln: College of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
However, ideal surfing conditions are a bit like sunny days in Britain, hard to find, particularly along England's North East Coast.
That's where data comes in!
Hitting the Spit (21st Century) by Jeremy GoffinUniversity of Lincoln: College of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
The days of driving along the coast to check on weather and wave conditions are now a thing of the past. Meteorological surf forecasting software is now altering how surfers search for waves.
Swell (21st Century) by Jeremy GoffinUniversity of Lincoln: College of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
Powerful apps like Magic Sea Weed and Surf-Forecast allow surfers to carefully track where the next big wave is going to form.
Utopia (21st Century) by Jeremy GoffinUniversity of Lincoln: College of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
This body of photography and graphic design work represents an attempt to capture this new perspective on surfing in which weather conditions such as wind direction, swell size and tidal changes affect the conditions along North East England’s undulating coastline.
Swell (21st Century) by Jeremy GoffinUniversity of Lincoln: College of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
Now technology offers surfers the ability to plan ahead, altering how they work and live in accordance with this new data driven environment.
Artefacts of Culture (21st Century) by Jeremy GoffinUniversity of Lincoln: College of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
Dings as Data
However, data comes in many forms, even in ‘dings’ on surfboards (elements of the board that have been hit and which have dented its surface). This respective data offers a new basis to understand the lives and experiences of the North Sea surfing community.
Dings are like ‘war wounds’, they serve as reminders of location, of that ‘gem’ wave, or the ‘one that got away’; memories of friendship at ‘backline’, waiting for waves during an icy North Sea sunrise.
The Printing Process (21st Century) by Jeremy GoffinUniversity of Lincoln: College of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
Using Surfboards as printing ‘plates’, the printed impressions of the ‘dinged’ board alongside interviews with surfers about these indentations and damaged areas of the board.
Dings as qualitative metadata (21st Century) by Jeremy GoffinUniversity of Lincoln: College of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
In this way data is helping us to form a new picture of the changing lives and experiences of the North Sea surfing community.
Jeremy Goffin | Senior Lecturer | BA (Hons) Graphic Design Programme
A polymathic creative, maker and early career researcher with a
methodology that is responsiveness, driven by the requirements of the surf based investigations, informed by and through practice via emerging themes of community, solitude, reverie, and the ontological glue which drives us all to surf in the cold (brown) North Sea.
The visual language finds semantic roots in print-based play & processes. focusing on the deconstruction and reconstruction through the medium of experiments which survive at the outer edges and explore the graphic and plastic cryptolect of North Sea surfing.
https://www.armchairhero.com
Email: jgoffin@lincoln.ac.uk
