Category: Social change

  • Citizens are Designers features in Permaculture Magazine

    Citizens are Designers features in Permaculture Magazine

    In Spring 2021, permaculture designer Anna Locke and I ran a project for the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill, Sussex. Citizens are Designers was delivered as part of their Care and Citizenship programme.

    We produced a shareable design resource, an easy-to-use design tool to help members of the local community become designers for local, place-based positive change.⁠

    The resource is featured in Permaculture Magazine 109. It was designed around Transition Design principles and helps people move from consumers to citizens, by designing a sustainable, healthy future for themselves and their community.

  • Cultural probes as discursive objects

    Cultural probes as discursive objects

    Making as a design practice is a successful way of engaging participants in dialogue about specific topics. I have developed a workshop based around ‘reciprocity’ (between humans and non-human worlds) as a specific concept within commons/-ing.

    Participants are given clear instructions for making a kaleidoscope from materials provided. They are asked to collect small items from the beach to place in the kaleidoscope. They are ask what they might ‘gift’ back to the environment they are in.

    This exercise successfully creates a space for people to reflect on their connection to place and ecology. They experience being on the beach discovering what’s there and reflecting on their responsibilities to that place.

    A reaction to the materials generates interest in the topic and perhaps, what the participants feel about the issues relating to place. These become discursive objects that can conjure scenarios through the experience of creation and use. There is a lovely element of surprise when the kaleidoscopes are made.

    It is important to bring in play when engaging with others, as Hella Jongerius says ‘without play, there can be no design that inspires’.

  • Design as Future Making

    Design as Future Making

    Historically design has pushed humans further from nature and seen nature as utilitarian. As Tham states, design has been the instrument that distinguishes humans from nature.1 Today, designers are working on design with nature practices that help ‘people develop a sense of treasuring nature’.2 More importantly designers should be working collaboratively with other disciplines and with citizens to develop a new relationship with nature.

    Design is ontological, and brings about particular ways of being, knowing, and doing.3 This requires a social practice ’embedded in and meditated by the space, places, messages, and things encountered every day’.4 Design can play a role in encouraging people to use their imaginations and tell new stories about their everyday lives.

    My work aligns with Transition Design. This involves a systems thinking, multi-stakeholder approach that involves backcasting, linking and amplifying projects.5

    There is a synergy between the commons and future-focused design theories and practice like metadesign. This notion relates to Ingold’s definition of commoning as an ‘imaginative act of casting our experience forward’.6

    Metadesign creates the conditions for citizens to be empowered to take action in their own lives and communities. To develop the capabilities of ‘change-agents’.7 An emerging design practice, metadesign creates social and technical infrastructures in which new forms of collaborative design can take place.8 It is a space where users of systems can be the designers.

    The world of collective, unremunerated action (such as Creative Commons, community gardens, gift economy) sits comfortably with metadesign practice.9 Fuad-Luke chooses to position metadesign away from environmental wellbeing10 but I would argue it is integral to its practice. John Wood states that metadesign is a self-reflexive design practice with an environmental agenda. It’s an ‘enterprise of seeding (“how things might be’)”.11

    Mathilda Tham calls metadesign ‘a license to dream’ (after John Wood) and an uncompromisingly systemic approach to future making.12
    Tham suggests we put big models and frameworks aside to instead start digging where we stand and get dirty. ‘It is so clear in design that the genuine love of a project comes when we start digging deep, with our bare hands, getting our psyches and souls in there’.13

    Excerpt from Master Module Workbook.

    1 Mathilda Tham, Dirty Design (or A Bloody Mess) In Celebration of Life Affirming Design in Design and Nature: A Partnership. London: Routledge, 2019. http://capitadiscovery.co.uk/brighton-ac/items/1501616. 137
    2 C Condell., Bertrand, G., Lipps, A., & McQuaid, M. (2019). Nature: Collaborations in design. New York,, NY: Published by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. 14
    3 Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse, Radical Interdependence, Autonomy and the Making of Worlds, ed. University of North Carolina Arturo Escobar, Chapel Hill and Clark University Dianne Rocheleau, New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018). x
    4 Susan Yelavich and Barbara Adams, eds., Design As Future-Making (London / New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2014).12
    5 Sarah Macbeth, Studio module workbook, 31.
    6 Tim Ingold, “Art and Anthropology for a Sustainable World.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 25, no. 4 (2019): 659-75. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13125. p675
    7 Fry, Design as politics. 79
    8 Jonathan Chapman and Nick. Gant, Designers, visionaries and other stories: a collection of sustainable design essays (London: Earthscan, 2007). http://capitadiscovery.co.uk/brighton-ac/items/1115620. 30
    9 Ibid., 103
    10 Ibid., 36
    11 Ibid., 102
    12 Mathilda Tham, “Wicked possibilities.” Presentation at Wicked Possibilities: Designing in and with systemic complexity [webinar], University of Brighton, UK, July 15, 2020. Available at https://vimeo.com/436882571
    13 Mathilda Tham, Dirty Design (or A Bloody Mess) In Celebration of Life Affirming Design in Design and Nature: A Partnership. London: Routledge, 2019. 139

  • Speculating… from my lockdown window

    Speculating… from my lockdown window

    During the first national lockdown, we were set a mini brief on the MA. The task was to create a single piece of work based on a view from a window in your home.

    I chose to reimagine the view from my lounge window as a large-scale urban forest garden. The diagram below shows a 7 acre space, some of it immediately visible from the window. There are many options as to how many people an acre of land could feed so I’ve simply written 4-400. There are many variables to consider such as the type of food grown, the climate, the weather, the technology used, the labour etc.

    I’m tempted to ask my neighbours if they’d be up for it!