Written by Zi Wang, Zach Camozzi, Louise St. Pierre
INDD200 Faculty zach Camozzi (2018-20) Charlotte Falk (2018-20), Sophie Guar (2020), and Amanda Huynh (2018)
As part of the Design for Biodiversity Project, students and researchers tried to bring designers into empathetic relationships with the natural world through various types of species cards. Three different iterations were prototyped and tested by three different designers, each attempting to support building a connection or understanding with the natural world. Designing for other-than-humans requires designers to recognize the limits of human-centred design. Making design-relevant decisions when you cannot stand in the shoes or flippers of your participant, nor perceive the world with the same senses, is very challenging. These species cards highlight some of these limits, and also show potential for engagement and learning.
Rockfish cards – Reyhan Yazdani
During Design for Biodiversity Phase 1: Reefs Rituals and Rockfish (2018) Reyhan Yazdani designed a simple set of species cards of cutout rockfish illustrations. These cards were given to design students while they were introduced to the habitats, lifecycles, sizes, and appearances of rockfish species. Cards in hand, participants made themselves more familiar with the species by seeing if their particular rockfish was being discussed in the introduction. Students named their rockfish cards, imagined contexts or scenarios for them, and several students carried the cards with them throughout phase one of the project. Paper rockfish turned up on beaches and in students’ process books. This simple visualization allowed students to direct their attention to the rockfish, and to consider how vulnerable they are to human-driven activities, such as factory farming. Rockfish are bi-catch, and although they can live up to 100 years old, many are caught before they can reach reproductive maturity.
“When we are referring to fish, we are referring to ourselves.”
Extinction Cards – Zi Wang
Holocene Extinction Species Cards were inspired by the article “To Name is to Value” (Lundebye, 2019), and tested in the Graduate Studies design studio. If destructive, human-driven activities continue unchecked, the current epoch will be known as another mass extinction event. Specialty and niche species are currently most affected, but will eventually lead to the extinction of more common flora and fauna. These cards ask students to pay attention to these precarious situations, and offer an example of how design can bring awareness to the seriousness of this period of extinction.
Everyone in the class was given a card illustrated with a specific species from one of five categories: birds, fishes, insects, mammals, and plants. Some of the species used on the cards are extinct, while others are endangered. During class time, the intermittent sound of animals was used to indicate a species that had become extinct in the intervening hour. Three species became extinct every hour, replicating the real-time daily extinction rate. Students who held an extinct species would have to relinquish their card into the “grave” (a plate) as a way of remembering and honouring extinction and biodiversity loss. This activity took five hours. After class, many participants were still discussing their species, and asking what led to their extinction.
Reference:Anette Lundebye. 2019. “To Name is to Value.” In K. Fletcher, L. St. Pierre, & M. Tham (Eds.), Design and Nature: A Partnership (pp. 86-92). Routledge.
Trophic cascade cards – Zach Camozzi and Zi Wang
During Phase 1 of Design for Biodiversity, it became clear that looking at one species in isolation was not the right approach. It did not give students the agency required to question the momentum and impact of modern design processes, and we felt that students should be given the opportunity to choose or recognize which species they are in relationship with. We also could not ignore the relationships between rockfish, kelp, starfish, urchins, otters, orcas and salmon. This third deck of cards attempted to share these interconnections through a simulation of a trophic cascade, where species consume other species in a cascading relationship. This is inspired by Survival, a common field game where children are given animal roles and they chase each other to “extinction.” Top predators control populations of grazing animals, which helps to sustain a healthy forest ecosystem. Instead of terrestrial interconnections, our Trophic Cascade Cards explored aquatic ecology; here, kelp is the forest of the sea and sea urchins are grazers.
Each Trophic Cascade Card contains several pieces of information: a species name; a picture; an image of a body posture to take when acting as that species; and an indication of how to move so others can identify you. To begin, each student is given a kelp card and follows the card instructions; feet planted, hands in the air waving their arms in the light current. This is bodystorming, which also might be recognized as role-playing, charades, or simply acting, and is a great way to break the ice, especially when the easterly current rolls in and the kelp is almost knocked over, hands waving wildly!
Bodystorming immediately removes the tension from the room, and the assignment offered students the permission to laugh and contort their bodies into weird or odd positions. After a couple of minutes, most students simulated the motions of the tide with ease and comfort. Urchins started eating kelp, and starfish started eating urchins. Salmon, rockfish, otters and orcas were all introduced to the group, and predator-prey relationships were discussed. During the game, participants discovered that the reduction of otter populations indirectly led to the disappearance of kelp forest, although there is no direct predatory relationship between them.
For some students, it is hard to comprehend that ocean ecology is just as diverse, or maybe more diverse than many coastal terrestrial ecosystems. A kelp forest sequesters carbon dioxide, creates habitat for a multitude of species, offers a throughway for small species to avoid large predators, and shelters species from heavy currents (or as we think of it on land, heavy winds). This understanding that ecology is interconnected and relational is fundamental—the demise of one species can potentially affect others. Positively working in one area can have unexpected cascading effects on others. Students started to grasp that what we do onshore can drastically impact kelp forests in the ocean.
The bodystorming continued by introducing environmental impacts: otter pelt hunting; seastar wasting; ocean pollution; ocean temperature rise. Eventually, all of the species present in the simulation became extinct, leaving a room full of starving urchins.
Bodystorming as an educational tool is well documented. Acting and imagining through pretend scenarios offer us opportunities to attempt to empathize with others, humans or otherwise, and helps build a clearer picture of the context we imagine working in. For us, designers and educators, it is a first step to get design students out of the studio, into immersive spaces, and think about ecology in a personal and embodied way. Students start to imagine what is below the surface; they imagine rockfish hiding in burrows, or killer whales diving into kelp beds to reach otters and salmon. If we take these charades and give them a design focus, we can generate a wealth of questions: How does being in the water change how I think about this context? How does kelp move when tides, wind and current combine? How does kelp attach itself to rocks? How does kelp grow over time? How can I design to help find these answers?
Species Cards as Research and Teaching Method
Whether used as a research or teaching method, these three iterations of species cards provided us with an opportunity to build empathetic resonance with the natural world. All of these prompts helped us understand species within their ecological web, where food, shelter, and mutual, symbiotic, or predatory relationships can be discussed. Species cards and role play are shown to mobilize the enthusiasm of students when teaching design for biodiversity.
INDD200 Faculty zach Camozzi (2018-20) Charlotte Falk (2018-20), Sophie Guar (2020), and Amanda Huynh (2018)
Within the Design for Biodiversity Project, we acknowledge that a one-time engagement is not enough to impact rapid biodiversity loss. Designs for biodiversity must contain rituals that are “understood to be deliberate and focused repeated moments of attention to phenomenon outside of ourselves” (St. Pierre, 2019) to protect, steward, connect or build a relationship with natural environments. Students are introduced to this definition of ritual and its purpose at the outset of the project, and are asked to look at Citizen Science, design of ritual, and First Nations perspectives for inspiration, important precedent, and indications of a greater purpose. To begin, students are asked to document activities that they currently do repeatedly in local coastal regions, in the form of a GIF. This format helps students see these activities differently and reframe them as rituals, helping them to recognize the power of place and the relevance of small impacts.
The following GIFs share rituals, or repeated actions, that may take place at a local beach.
The following GIFs represent new rituals, that some INDD200 students have considered as worthy of the Design for Biodiversity brief. Consistent themes include: slowing down and spending more time immersed in nature; activating senses other than sight; looking under the surface of the water; ephemeral mark-making; and reflecting on experiences.
INDD200 Faculty zach Camozzi (2018-20) Charlotte Falk (2018-20), Sophie Guar (2020), and Amanda Huynh (2018)
The Design for Biodiversity project asks designers to consider how our discipline can support biodiversity and ecological relationships within local coastal regions. In 2019, phase 2 of the project brought students to Thluk-Thluk-Way-Tun (Barnet Marine Park).Coastlines in this territory have been cared for since “time out of mind” (Thomas, 2019) by Coast Salish nations, including the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. In an intimate lecture, Carleen Thomas of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation shared her lived experiences, family history. Her skillful weaving of past with present narratives captured students’ attention. They began to ask questions that were less about outcomes, solving problems, and capturing data, and more about questioning and building personal relationships with the ocean. It was a pivotal moment.
“If we are to be creating a presence in natural environments, we need to be informed of how we are, and have been, affecting and will continue to affect these locations.”
- INDD200 students Dee and Yutaan Process Book
“When something is solved we normally don’t care / think about it anymore. Instead of looking for solutions we should focus on the experience and how that experience can provoke awareness of preserving and caring for the ocean."
- Anonymous INDD200 Student
Carleen spoke of traditional life on the shores of səl̓ilw̓ət (Burrard inlet), and the relationship the Tsleil-Waututh have with the biodiversity there: Littleneck clams, butter clams, horse clams, barnacles, urchins, fish, and orcas. Carleen painted a picture of a very different inlet, one that included clamming, berry picking, summer and winter villages. She overlaid this with a simple message: there is an “interconnection between the health of a culture and the health of the environment” (Thomas, 2019). Many of us understand that the current reality is a fairly bleak contrast; one of pollution, water acidification, pipelines and tankers. Digging for clams is a very visceral way to understand these impacts. Their reduced size, thinner shells, and scarcity can all be experienced directly. This was compared Carleen’s stories of what a healthy ecosystem once felt like. Students expressed inspiration, envy, honour, and respect for Carleen’s discussion on her family history.
“Carlene comes from a culture with rituals that are deeply connected with nature, I envied this but realized that the rituals do not have to be hundreds of generations old. I can make my own rituals that connect me to the place/ environment that I occupy now.”
- Anonymous INDD200 Student
“We were very inspired by these memories and stories, that could be traced back to family and friends and not a textbook."
- INDD200 students Juliaand Lucia Process Book
Imagery of Carleen’s relatives were used to share not only family stories but also to offer direct links to the geographical range that her people care for. Say Nuth Khaw Yum Provincial Park (Previously Indian Arm), “the Land of the Serpent” (Thomas, 2019), was prominent. To this day the Tsleil-Waututh care and steward the stunning waters of Say Nuth Khaw Yum Indian arm and səl̓ilw̓ət Burrard inlet, standing up against the trans mountain pipeline and the colonial, modern, extractivist views it embodies. Carleen has seen first hand, from sitting on beachwood with her grandchildren and playing with seaweed, that the inlet can recover if humans take on a role that includes themselves in a web of biodiversity and gives all life the time and attention required to participate in recovery.
Carleen Thomas is a mother, grandmother, spouse, sister, and community member.In her role as a Special Projects Manager,Council Member, and Relationships and Protocol coordinator for the Tsleil-Waututh Nation (People of the Inlet), she has worked on building community relationships for the Tsleil-Waututh Nation with many diverse entities, from fisheries, to museums, to intergovernmental tables. The work ranges from policies, to creating space for indigenous voice, to governance. She works on projects that are in transition, transformation, and forward-looking to building better, equal, working relationships.She has spent a lot of time with the Indigenous Advisory & Monitoring Committee for the Trans Mountain Pipeline, and educating about climate change.
Thomas, C. (Nov 15, 2019) Carleen Thomas lecture - Tsleil-Waututh Nation 101. Retrieved from https://www.ecuad.ca/calendar/carleen-thomas-lecture-tsleil-waututh-nation-101
Written By Reyhan Yazdani, Photo Credits: Zara Huntley
I remember my grandparents’ house, a brick building with a very large garden in front.
In the summer, at noon,
on the table would be baskets of fresh herbs.
Everyone, men and women, would gather around the table. With their sleeves up, talking and laughing loudly, they would prepare the herbs for lunch.
Through a storytelling approach, the workshop, Vegetable Talk II, explores the notion of rituals in the context of contemporary design and Biodiversity.
The workshop, which was offered as part of the Industrial Design Core Studio, invited students to engage in various nature-based ritualistic activities while thinking about the possibilities of storytelling and rituals in design. The set up for the workshop contained a long table covered by a table cloth, divided into separated parts, with ingredients and materials placed on top. Each part had its own story written with instructions leading students through the collective experiences of cutting fruits, pinching leaves, and whispering their thoughts to the water.
Hold the bowl of water in your hands,
Feel the temperature,
the coldness of it in comparison to your body temperature,
bring it closer to your body,
let this connection to be strong,
between your body,
the ceramic bowl,
the water inside,
look at the water and share your thoughts with it,
whisper the words,
be present.
pass the water to the person next to you,
repeat,
when finished,
drink.
INDD200 Faculty zach Camozzi, Charlotte Falk
Using rituals and contemplation as frameworks for making, the workshop invited students to have a tangible interaction, collaboration and engagement with the materials, stories and each other. As a result of the workshop, among other things, were propositions for new rituals and also tools for eating and consuming the “salad” which was made during the workshop collectively by students. Some concepts and ideas were shared with the class as well as reflections on the experience.
It is the last Wednesday of the Winter.
Everyone gathers around to celebrate the change of the season,
acknowledging that nature made it through and spring is on its way.
INDD200 Faculty zach Camozzi (2018-20) Charlotte Falk (2018-20), Sophie Guar (2020), and Amanda Huynh (2018)
The Design for Biodiversity project partnered with Amanda Weltman, a field researcher with Ocean Wise Coastal Ocean Research Institute and Howe Sound Research and Conservation. Amanda’s personal work includes diving Howe Sound to study and manage Rockfish habitat and populations.
In 2019, Amanda Weltman introduced Industrial Design 2nd year students to citizen science initiatives in the region, including her own Rockfish Abundance Surveys, Eagle Counts and Bio-blitzes. Amanda helped students understand how all organisms are vital to the interdependent balance and overall well-being of an ecosystem. She discussed how humans influence or attempt to control this balance. Citizen Science initiatives offer a tangible and searchable approach for students to springboard their own research. Students can easily find examples of conservation or remediation initiatives. They can also take part in citizen science activities that support biodiversity and ecology.
The Bio-Blitz (guided by Weltman, 2019) was a huge success in getting students out to the waterfront. Students were asked to choose a location and document all the biodiversity they could observe, or see, in that place. This is an intriguing starting point for designers interested in biodiversity because it prioritizes sight, something we bias in Western Modernity. However, relationships to biodiversity also occur through other senses: the smell of seaweed rotting; the sounds of gulls cawing; and the sensation of touching a small or large crab. These other sense impressions can lead to a stronger sense of connection. Our ability to observe with all senses increases with practice, so the Bio-Blitz was done in combination with Andrew Simon’s sensory observation prompts. These activities asked students to leave the classroom and focus on a local outdoor waterfront. Students used these activities in many different ways. Some socialized with peers, others meditated, and others reminisced about past experiences at the beach. This context started to influence their work. Students later reflected that while working outdoors there was less pressure from colleagues or the school, and they genuinely enjoyed the experience for a range of reasons. They discussed how the quality of this time felt different and allowed them to recharge before returning to the campus studio and shops to continue to work on assignments and other courses. Overall the impromptu Bio-Blitz was a unique and unexpected addition to the course. It played a valuable role in the progression of the students’ research.
“The first time we went to the beach for a bio-blitz and Andy’s reflection made a lasting impression on me. I sat on a log with my eyes closed, breathing in the sea salt, hearing the seagulls in the sky above, and feeling the winter cold air brush against my skin. I felt calm and at peace for the first time in a long time. Since then, I have gone down to the beach several times to revisit the experience of immersing myself in a meditative space.”- INDD200 Anonymous reflection
“The first bio-blitz I did was deflating because I didn’t see as much life as I was expecting and was used to seeing in my childhood. Another time, a group of classmates went on a early morning hike before a work period. We all got to relax and connect with nature before addressing our project that was concerned with biodiversity. I felt very connected because I realized how easy it is to appreciate nature in our everyday lives and how it can influence the process of making.” - INDD200 Anonymous reflection
“The water didn’t look as clear as the waters from Deep Cove and Kitsilano Beach. Reflecting on my research and Amanda’s lecture, I think this bio-blitz reminded me of how the man-made and the natural world are intertwined. Instead of trying to separate them, what are ways that we can use this situation for the better? How can we coexist without exploitation? How can we get the community to coexist actively instead of passively?” - Ara Rattan
Terms such as ecology, biodiversity, conservation, and remediation are not often discussed in design. They are usually considered the realm of the scientist. Amanda patiently guided the students to understand that while citizen science supplies data for scientific research, it also educates participants about local issues. Data can instill a sense of community through collective action, and “combat feelings of helplessness within the growing number of ecological disasters we are facing in our current climate crisis” (Yutaan K Lin and Ingrid D Van Zyl student process book).
Early in this project, students were shown the range of tools used in citizen science. This included pens, paper, pails, recording devices, cameras, apps, shovels, clothing, transportation and custom-made sampling devices. These tools have interesting congruence with the tools for repeated ritual that students were designing. As with tools for citizen science, the tools for repeated ritual were designed for immediate and local response, and could include improvisational approaches.
The Design for Biodiversity project asked students to question if a connection to a species is more important than counting and tracking them. Connection requires the building of a relationship, where conservation may not. Will we and do we conserve the things that we are not in a relationship with? Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability (DESIS) becomes important in this context, and students began to discuss “Citizen science for Social Innovation.” The DESIS lens opens the possibility of designed outcomes that include facilitating and augmenting activities, encouraging engagement or immersion, and community practices or rituals. While citizen science (and all of science) matters, the reason many biologists do this work in the first place is grounded in deep questions about an ethical and moral stance in relationship with nature; this is the focus of the Design for Biodiversity project. How can we help communities become engaged with, and supportive of, marine biodiversity along the local coastline? How can design support relationships with nature?
As faculty, we continually remind the students they are not scientists. This is another reason why we partner with Amanda Weltman: she represents science expertise in the project. She has been a partner in Design for Biodiversity since its conception in 2018 when we designed to support Rockfish habitat in the Reefs, Rituals and Rockfish project. She continues to support the collaboration as an external expert who supplies information on current species at risk, habitat restoration, and conservation in Howe Sound. She also finds ways to show her appreciation and interest in the types of perspectives Emily Carr students take. She supported the Emily Carr visit to the Vancouver Aquarium, and offered feedback about the final projects with some of her colleagues including Donna Gibbs (2018/19) and Jeff Marlieve (in 2018).
Written by Zara Huntley, photo credits: Zara Huntley
INDD200 Faculty zach Camozzi (2018-20) Charlotte Falk (2018-20), Sophie Guar (2020), and Amanda Huynh (2018)
Designing for biodiversity feels like something my industrial design cohort all shares as a common interest. We are all like-minded people entering the design field with a strong interest in sustainability and hopeful that our practice will better the world. The topic of sustainability is easy to discuss and is discussed often. Regardless of everyone’s background, we all have a relationship to the earth. Whether that relationship was formed through countless hours spent among mountains or growing up in an exclusively urban setting, these relationships persist daily. It’s easy to relate to the earth and reflect on how one has bettered from its being. We depend on it for our survival.
Yet, during last year’s project designing reefs and rituals for rockfish which inhabit Porteau Cove, I realized my relationship with nature was not as vast or strong as I had originally thought. I felt well versed in my knowledge of the outdoors, and the importance of respecting our environment. My confidence was quickly annulled after my first visit to one of the sites. Following a period of secondary research my partner and I decided to get in the ocean to understand our co-creators, the rockfish. On a mild November day, we waded into the water at a local rockfish conservation area in West Vancouver. Although we didn’t have scuba gear to dive below the surface and see our ‘clients’ in their homes, our perspective on what was needed for the design outcome changed substantially. Tacit knowledge aside, we truly knew very little about the natural world around us, especially when it came to underwater habitats. I realized my connection to the environment had only gone so deep.
Sitting in throughout this year’s iteration of the project – this time designing tools and rituals for kelp – it was incredible to see the students’ ideas unfold over the course of the project. Arriving at Barnet Marine Park, it was cold and cloudy, but a refreshing change of pace to step outside the classroom. After a brief chat, groups were left to their own devices to silently take stock of their surroundings and test their prototypes. Everyone felt stiff and stagnant at first, and there was no kelp in sight. But, after some time spent silently exploring the landscape, the students began to dive in, and for some that was literal. Prototypes were tested, some were destroyed, and almost everyone attempted to explore under the water in one way or another. The realization of how little the students knew about their own kelp co-creators was apparent over the course of a few hours. Immersing your time and concentration into a project is what we know as students and designers. However, designing for nature, you have to get outside the classroom to even begin understanding the environment, and these experiences create new perspectives.
Although many students entering their studies in industrial design share a passion for promoting sustainable biodiversity, an on-location learning experience fosters a deeper understanding of the environment and its intricacies than any traditional classroom can offer. Through my own experiences, and observation of the experiences of others, I have seen first-hand the profound effect this form of education can have on students. This effect was evident in the improvements to their projects this year following their site visit. Within the few short weeks between the Barnet Marine Park field trip and the class’ final critique, students’ project concepts dove deeper into their subjects and the fidelity of their models increased exponentially. It’s no coincidence this dramatic shift in focus, scope, and insight came about immediately following their research in nature.
Research project leads: louise st pierre, zach camozzi
INDD 200 Faculty: zach Camozzi, Charlotte Falk
How can prompts be used to support design students in developing their understanding of their connection with nature?
This project responds to Ezio Manzini’s DESIS 2020 Conversations article in September of 2019, in which he encouraged designers to “see better.” The Design for Biodiversity project aims to explore how a design student might see the natural world better. My five-week research exploration contributed to the project objectives by nudging students to create a deliberate time and space to explore different ways to relate to the natural world. I wanted to start to understand what it takes to come to know local ecosystems, even in the smallest of ways.
This question: “how can prompts encourage students to develop their connection with nature,” was the central focus of my Master of Design research project. I had the opportunity to work with a group of second-year Industrial Design students at Emily Carr. Students were asked to return to a place of their choosing at the water’s edge over a series of weeks. I developed a number of activities that asked them to engage with nature using all of their senses. Choreographed prompt books led students through a series of meditative and reflective experiences, and focused on selected senses each week. The prompts encouraged experiences that would expand their ability to understand and communicate their connection with nature.
My hope was that once students begin to understand the deep ways in which we are all interrelated with the natural world, that they may begin to bring greater environmental awareness to the centre of their work.
Cycles of return
The participants were asked to return to the same waterfront location three times. They were also given prompts during class field trips at the Vancouver Aquarium and at Barnet Marine Park. Returning to the same place gave the students a chance to actively explore the natural elements around them. It gave them the chance to see a place over time, to see its micro and macro elements. And ultimately, it gave them a chance to consider how these elements impacted each other and themselves as people and as designers.
Each experience started with a centring exercise. This was an active, focused and purposeful activity that brought their attention to the here and now. It brought their thoughts to this place, at this time. This was an important step for beginning to appreciate how they related to the natural world in, around, and under the waves. On the front of every sealed prompt book were these instructions:
Grab a timer set for five minutes. Hold this prompt with two hands.Breathe deeply.After your five minutes, break the seal open.
Sensory inquiry: Prompt activities
After opening the prompt books, students were offered short sensory exercises that encouraged rich engagement with natural elements. They were asked to smell, to taste the air, to feel the natural textures around them. They were encouraged to notice changes, ripples, waves; the small, the large. In returning to a place and experiencing it in different ways each time, they came to understand it in very different ways.
How does one know a place? Two key findings…
In a response to the exit survey, one student wrote “(these prompts) let me stop and really listen and observe nature without looking for anything in particular. I also felt quite situated whenever I began to draw on my senses. This is a practice I’ve done before but never within the context of the ocean.” Design students have a series of methods that they rely on for design projects, but many respondents indicated that they never thought to use these tools as a conduit to experience nature. I see a valuable opportunity to direct design methods and tools towards understanding and connecting with the natural world.
Another key finding from this work was the profound silence I observed among the students when they were engaging with the prompts. There was a contemplative focused energy about the way they interacted with the prompts and the natural environment. It was clear, both from what I saw and from the responses to the exit surveys, that focused contemplation in nature created conditions in which students found themselves seeing better and sensing better. The natural world may have been in front of them all along, but there was a different quality to these experiences. Perhaps we all need a prompt to bring our attention away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life, from the compelling momentum of the design process, and towards what matters most: Earth and all her wondrous, weird, and important interactions. Perhaps then we might be able to understand where we sit in this whole big mess.
Louise St. Pierre, Emily Carr University; Caro McCaw, Otago Polytechnic
INTRODUCTION
This essay considers a design student project that practised methods and languages for connecting designers with the more-than-human. The term refers to ecologist David Abram’s phrase “the more-than-human world” as a way of considering our entanglement with earthly nature.1 Alongside ecological thinking, we drew upon New Zealand Māori and Canadian First Nation scholars and worked with local cultural advisors. This project was offered across two design classes, beginning with one in Vancouver, Canada, and the other in Dunedin, New Zealand, with a six-week synchronous window.2 These schools connected through DESIS, a network of labs that research social innovation and sustainability. Teachers and students were able to share their approaches and progress online, culminating in an online exhibition and conversation. Key ideas explored included Karl Wixon’s “whakapapa-centred design”3 and Robin Wall-Kimmerer’s “grammar of animacy,”4 indigenous values that centre the natural world as sentient and present with the world of humans. Students were tasked with becoming advocates for a more-than-human being. They drew upon multiple frames to learn about this being and conceive of possible different relationships. After conducting a series of immersive research activities including meditative, phenomenological and academic approaches, students drew upon their design skills to translate and share their learning. The outcomes are a variety of prototypes, designed to share this advocacy as experiences for others. Through a combination of online and embodied learning, many explorations brought to light understandings about the fundamental interconnectedness of humans with the earth, with all species and with each other.
BEGINNINGS
This project began, as many do, with a conversation.
Conversations can collect thoughts. They require two or more participants and require attentive listening and appreciative reflection. Communication with open intention is inclusive of multiple perspectives and understandings. Time and space open up through skillful listening and attention. Thich Nhat Hanh identifies that “[t]o listen is first of all to be fully present and not distracted.”5 In this course, students developed abilities to be attentive and fully present to the life force in another being, shifting their attention and communication, “maybe just 20° away from what we have been taught to seek, to bring attention to the living earth; to forests, ravens and ground squirrels.”6 This shift affirms that more-than-human beings have much to offer to design conversations.
This project brought together design students across the Pacific Ocean, from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, Canada, to Otago Polytechnic School of Design in Dunedin, New Zealand. Both schools were united through their common relationship in the DESIS Network, where research labs are dedicated to exploring social innovation for sustainability. The project drew together texts and experiences, local indigenous advice and our worlds around us; we endeavored to listen together appreciatively, reflect and use our design tools and languages to share and communicate our relationships with others.
Two texts framed the shared project. Robin Wall-Kimmerer’s essay “Learning the Grammar of Animacy”7 describes the author’s experience learning her indigenous language, and with it new relationships to the natural world, in constant vibrant flux, in states of being and becoming. Wall- Kimmerer combined perspectives from science with her grounding in the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She shared multiple understandings of her sense of place and belonging in these worlds. She made connections between the traditional Potawatomi language and the biological world, as she integrated new learning made available to her through the vocabulary and grammar of her native tongue. At first, in frustration, she describes the limitations imposed by the predominant use of nouns in the English language. Nouns remove life, reducing nature to “things.” Most of the words in her Potawatomi language are verbs … “to be a hill” or “to be a bay.”8 These places are defined by their animate qualities, and only become perceived as fixtures in a landscape when considered in English, as nouns. Wall-Kimmerer describes her epiphany when she identified the difference that verbs allowed her in terms of perception:
In that moment I could smell the water of the bay, watch it rock against the shore and hear it sift onto the sand. A bay is a noun only if the water is dead. When “bay” is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores, and contained by the word. But wiikegama, to be a bay, the verb releases the water from bondage and lets it live.9
Robin Wall-Kimmerer
Through breathing life back into her language Wall-Kimmerer is breathing life back into her world. This changes our conversation, too, as she asks us to use language and active thoughts as we consider our natural worlds. For instance, she suggests that we replace the use of “it” with “she, he, or they” when referring to natural beings.10 We encouraged this practice by example. For instance, we would say in reference to lichen, “She lives on the rocks.” Or, about a tree, “His roots are fed by the mitochondria.” By adopting this phrasing, students found themselves in more intimate relationship with their beings.
Founder of Māori Design Society Ngā Aho, Karl Wixon’s article “Whakapapa-centred design”11 was read alongside Wall-Kimmerer’s text, and also contributed to students’ conversations through their reading and reflection. Wixon identified indigenous Māori values and protocols (tikanga) and how these connect people and place and can also be read as a necessary approach to design: “‘Whakapapa’ is generally translated in English as genealogy, but it is much wider and deeper and is at the very heart of Māori ontology and identity. It connects people and place in an inseparable way.”12
As we began a project that required students to engage directly with their environment in order to forge social connections, these indigenous wisdom stories were a reminder to respect the important relationships that have been forged before us, during the times of our earliest ancestors arriving and becoming.
But Wixon’s knowledge, like Wall-Kimmerer’s, also proposed methods. “When we anchor design in whakapapa and tikanga, we open up all of our senses, we view people, place and environment as inseparable and interdependent, we engage deeply in ways that form enduring bonds, commitments and sense of consequence.”13
This sense of deep social connection and understanding of consequence that Wixon describes leads naturally to greater care in design. We regularly reminded the students to avoid extractive and exploitative approaches, such as harvesting materials to make artefacts, and to take care that insights from nature would not be operationalised in utilitarian contexts. Wixon cautioned as well that we not “extract natural resources with no sense of consequence or intergenerational effect.”14 These approaches need to be held at the centre of design practice, building non-extractive relationships that are inclusive and respectful of all beings.
We reached out to our local indigenous advisors to help us learn appropriate and respectful ways. In New Zealand this approach is considered within a bicultural conversation, encompassing the two cultures – indigenous Māori (First Nations) and non-Māori or Pākehā – who formed a co- governance treaty in 1840. Ron Bull15 describes how we have come to know each other’s ways, and through this ongoing conversation have opened up a third cultural space. He spoke online to our students about his identity and connections to his own whakapapa, as Māori, from the southern islands of New Zealand. These narratives, he adds, may be part fact and part story, but he is certain of their implications, of his connections and responsibilities toward the landscapes – mountain and river, the islands and the birds – that he is connected to through his whakapapa. He also talked about his experiences of meeting First Nation people in British Columbia, and the connections he made – forging connections across the ocean.
In British Columbia, things are more complex. This Canadian province is home to almost 200 First Nation communities, with over 36 dialects spoken. Among these Nations there are many overlapping forms of ritual, grounding, respect and greeting, but there are also different cultural ways. We cannot refer to a singular indigenous culture. In Canada, indigenous reconciliation has only just begun, and the infusion of indigenous wisdom into academia is not as far along as it is in New Zealand. Indigenous Advisor Connie Watts16 impressed upon us an understanding that seemed to be central among many First Nations: that everything is comprised of energy. The energy might be slow, as in a rock or mountain, but it is always moving, movable, and can be heard; this energy, whatever manifestation it might appear as, is all the same. Everything is alive. In these teachings, Connie made it clear that modernity’s notion that sentience is restricted to humans and animals is inaccurate. All beings, including trees, rivers and mountains are sentient. “Everything is one,” she said.
As part of her pedagogy, Connie led the Canadian group through several circle conversations in which she brought each person ‘into the room’ by inviting responses to a series of personal questions in turn, such as “Where are you from? Who are your ancestors? What do you love about this project?” This intimate conversational format left a legacy for the class. Circle conversations featured largely in later meetings and class discussions, and even replaced design critique. The classroom, whether virtual or in person, became a place to unravel questions and offer support for one another. This form of engaged pedagogy eases pathways for new and sometimes unsettling learning.
OUR PROJECT
In our 2021 project, Canadian students were in lockdown, most working – and attending our online classes – from home. In 2022 the opposite was true, and this time New Zealand students were working at home through pandemic conditions, while Canadians were at last free to meet at design school and work in their studios. The online nature of the project was able to bridge our varying conditions and although many were home-bound, the core of this international exchange was a deep focus on the local. Even those with restricted travel conditions could walk outside their home and find evidence of nature with their first step. This brought new agents to our online conversation, and both familiar and unfamiliar species to our collective work. Although our classes coincided for six weeks, the Emily Carr semester had started six weeks before their Otago counterparts. These students began on their path in advance and were able to mentor and demonstrate their approaches and understandings as their peers in Otago approached the project.
As mentioned above, the project began with a conversational approach, as students were tasked with developing a social relationship with a more-than-human being. The term refers to ecologist David Abram’s phrase “the more-than-human world”17 as a way of considering our entanglement with earthly nature. Designers explore many different methods and processes in relation with people, nature, materials, forms and artefacts. In this project, we focus on how this can be considered a conversation in Donald Schön’s terms. Schön described this approach as “a reflective conversation with the situation.”18 Each situation is unique, complex and uncertain, and must be continually reframed, requiring reflective action, which is the basis of a conversation. In this conversation, the situation “talks back.”19
In this way, speaking and listening takes place between designer and material, designer and sketch model, and between models and sketches themselves, with increasing complexity. Bringing the animate world into this conversation opens an additional dimension that requires a new skill set for designers, one that rests largely, as we noted earlier, on building new listening skills. How long must we sit with a tree to hear her words? What does she have to say about this day? A process that was already very dynamic became increasingly emergent, and at times out of the control of the designers. This, we speculate, is a good thing. The natural world has been degraded for centuries due to the modern impulse for control.20 To not be in control means to engage in wholehearted spiritedness with an otherness that has integral rights and agency. It also has mystery.
The design brief asked students to learn first through their bodies – in Wixon’s terms “to open up all their senses.”21 This required apprehension, appealing to their being, becoming available physically in their world, in a phenomenological sense. The project began with roaming outside. Students can’t start this project in front of a screen. They need to physically relocate outside of the classroom to identify a possible project partner, all the while remaining open to different ways of feeling, listening and ‘being with.’ As Kimmerer said, “Listening in wild places, we witness conversation in a language that is not our own.”22 This took a leap of faith initially, but in order to participate in what Lynch and Mannion identify as “ongoing reciprocal response-making,”23 learners and educators must first become attentive. Through this process, most students became aware of their entanglement with other beings.
These early conversations were attentive to the centrality of the natural world as sentient and present with the world of humans. Students were tasked with becoming advocates for another (more-than-human) being, and drew upon many different modalities – experiential, sensorial, embodied, collaborative, collective and academic – in order to learn about their being and conceive of possible different relationships.
Students created a shortlist of possible beings – ranging from lichen, birds, bears, rivers and mountains – to work with, eventually narrowing the selection to one entity for each student. Importantly, the students also created a species card to describe themselves, within similar categorisations as for their chosen being. Students described their own class, species, habitat, food supply, food sensitivities, ecological sensitivities and other factors. Displaying their own species card alongside a card for their chosen being positioned them among other beings, rather than above them. This was a subtle challenge to human exceptionalism, the pervasive view since the seventeenth century, that humans are apart from and more important than other species.24 Referring to their parallel species cards throughout the semester, students were regularly reminded that they are included in the wondrous diversity of the animate earth.
After a species was selected, students conducted deep-dive research, including academic approaches and design approaches such as multi-sensory exploration, meditation, system mapping and sketching. At this stage, it was easy for some students to become overwhelmed by information, as it became increasingly apparent how many interconnections there were between their species, other life forms and surrounding ecosystems. In the midst of scientific knowledge, the question came up repeatedly: What is a designer? What does a designer contribute to this relationship? The system maps proved to be important ways of organising the complexity of new learning. Some students took it upon themselves to research ways of mapping, and developed highly visual charts that were integral to their project outcomes.
Once surrounded by different forms of knowledge, students drew upon their design tools and languages – along with other knowledge systems available to them – to translate and share their learning through the design of an experience that advocated for their chosen being. During this design and development stage, the students met online in small groups for feedback and critique, developing friendships and an appreciation for similar and dissimilar approaches, places and beings.
The outcomes are a variety of prototypes, designed to convey students’ learning and advocacy as experiences for other audiences. One student spent weeks trying to engage crows in a game that he had designed for them, only to see the crows regularly take his offering of food and skip away. He determined then to meet the crows on their own terms. He designed a shelf that would clip on easily to any window as a landing deck where crows (or other winged beings) could be offered water and food. Like him, many other students encountered the agency of other beings and shifted their designs to respond to them.
Themes of communication and storytelling resonated through the projects. One student was so enchanted by the stories her classmates told of their experiences with trees, bogs, mushrooms and nudibranchs that she designed and hosted a series of podcasts featuring each of her classmates’ beings. Another designer reached out to a mushroom foraging group and asked them to complete a survey aimed at learning about the different ways people got to know mushrooms, in order to gain insight into developing fungi friendships. One student spent weeks studying and listening carefully to decode the language of a stream. She created a series of interpretive tiles for an adjacent school, so that children could also listen more deeply and notice all the small beings who inhabit the stream.
Some of the projects were intimate and personally transformative. The student who swam in the cold winter ocean every week to honour the salmon; the student who went for a barefoot run and over the weeks developed an appreciation for the benefits of slow attentiveness to the task at hand, inspired by the worms beneath his feet. Qualities of attention and listening permeated all projects, some directly and others indirectly, and all led to a change of relationship between the designers and the natural world.
LEARNING ACROSS MULTIPLE DOMAINS
We referred above to Donald Schön’s conversation with a given situation where reflection-in-action is the reflective form of knowing-in-action, indicating that the languages of making are at play in a given student’s designing. While Schön was focused on identifying a spatial action language inherent in design, our conversation deepens the appreciation for phenomenological and design- making languages. The addition of animist practices helps to further “spread mind and creativity out much more widely.”25 We also share the belief that many “design practices can support other ways of knowing. Sketch models, drawings, reflective documentation, role play and storytelling can unlock designers from their thinking self and help them see things differently.”26
Numerous other elements were introduced to our – much noisier – conversation, which drew together multiple beings, multiple locales, multiple cultures and multiple approaches as designers shared their projects with peers, faculty and classmates. For many students there was a new and embodied realisation that everything is interconnected … that more-than-human beings have always had something to say.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
The intentions of the DESIS network are to research design that incorporates social innovation for sustainability, with a focus on relationships and community. After this project, we now know with certainty that all beings have insights to offer our social innovations, and that limiting community to human-to-human has serious flaws for any sustainable future. Upon reflection, we realise that intriguing spaces and possible new communities opened up as a consequence of our trust in sentience. The design students took up all the necessary tools and languages to engage in ways that held these spaces open for periods of interconnected learning, for new conversations. Through these conversations we identified three design system relationships that can be understood differently.
Reconceiving systems: We recognise that our emerging methods reflect those of design ethnographies, drawing for example on observation techniques and empathic interpretation, engagement and sense-making.27 However, our practice reconsiders a design system without humans at the centre.
Trust and letting go: We found that this kind of learning is highly engaging and is available to everybody who is willing to pause and pay attention – and is willing to let go of preconceptions about knowledge, design process and an outcome focus. Personal trust in a different starting point is required, and an acceptance that designers can turn to design tools when they need them, rather than start with them on hand and let familiar tools dictate the result.
Tools and their place: This project helped us to reconceive what a design tool can be, and what an exploratory tool can be. In an online workshop held during lockdown, the Roving Designers28 asked students to raid their homes for spoons, yarn or other tools that could support exploration. The research tool was then something domestic and incidental. Further, the engagement between human and more-than-human allowed for tools to be realised during the research activity. For example, one designer chose to hang from a branch of a tree in order to see the world from another perspective. The branch became a tool for examining differing perspectives. It is only the relationship between the tree and the body that allows a tool-like quality to be identified in that moment. This example may help us see the limitations of both tools and ethnographies. The branch shifted from an element of observation to a device that helped to change the observation process. Within the system of observer–observed, the previously observed became a different element with a new role.
Another unsettling example can be seen in the student who asked, “What does the tree see when the tree sees me?”29 In conventional ethnography the designer does not ask, “How does the research subject see me”? This posture signifies an extraordinary amount of humility and a resetting of presumed hierarchies. It brings humans into the place, into an authentic relationship, one which is non-extractive and compassionate.
We recognise that we are not alone in these efforts,30 but are developing particular methods with which to form connections and relationships that may grow and connect us and our learners with an animate world. These methods acknowledge and make room for more than one worldview, including the views of our local indigenous cultures. In this project we have learned that through iterative design conversations and attentive listening, other voices can be heard.
Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge firstly the invaluable contributions of Connie Watts and Ron Bull, First Nation and Māori cultural advisors whose contributions to our project allowed us to better understand important indigenous relationships to local natural environments. The Canadian group The Roving Designers made an important contribution in the first iteration of this project, where they introduced students to alternative tools for exploring the natural world. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the trust in us and in each other shown by our students, in our evolving conversation, alongside the work of our students across 2021 and 2022 in INDD310 – Design for all beings: engaging with more-than-human species at Emily Carr University of Art and Design (Vancouver, CA); and DK733101 – Communication Design Studio Teams 1 – More than Human stream at Otago Polytechnic (Dunedin, NZ). We did not enter into this project with the intention of doing research, but with a curiosity that aligned with our values and as identified through collegial conversation. The project has not been subjected to an ethics committee process and we have attempted to remove all identifiable student information that may be considered in any way harmful to their wellbeing. We are grateful for our shared journey.
Caro McCaw is an associate professor and head of programme Communication Design at Otago Polytechnic. She employs creative social practice and approaches in art and design contexts. Embracing sustainable, decolonial and indigenous agendas, her workplaces emphasis on social relationships, interdependency and care, to suggest empathic and alternative ways of knowing and being, across diverse projects and contexts. She is the coordinator of the Otago DESIS (Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability) lab, a node in an international network, and an umbrella and a hub for a community of like-minded researchers.
Louise St Pierre descends from a long line of settler farmers and artisans. Her passion for the Earth has propelled her to research ecological design throughout her career. She is co-author of the internationally recognised Industrial Design curriculum, Okala Ecological Design. She established Canada’s first DESIS Lab at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver. She brings animist views to DESIS, decentering the human and contending that all beings are social. In her PhD, she integrated her concern for environmental sustainability with her Buddhist practice to understand how modern culture’s tendency to diminish our relationships with nature has implicated designers. Her recent publications including Design and Nature (with Kate Fletcher and Mathilda Tham) and Design for Biodiversity (with Zach Camozzi) offer a range of examples of how designers can reprioritise the importance of the natural world and challenge human exceptionalism.
David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-human World (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996).
Werefertoourrespectivenationstatesusingtheir non-indigenous nanes for the sake of clarity for our international readers. New Zealand is also know as Aotearoa and Canada is part of the larger nation known as Turtle Island.
Karl Wixon, “Whakapapa Centred Design Explained …,” Linkedin, 16 August 2020, https://www. linkedin.com/pulse/whakapapa-centred-design- explained-karl-wixon.
Robin Wall-Kimmerer, “Learning the Grammar of Animacy,” The Leopold Outlook (Winter 2012), 4-9.
Thich Nhat Hanh, Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet (San Francisco, CA: HarperOne, 2021), 191.
Louise St Pierre, “A Shift of Attention,” in Design and Nature: A Partnership, eds K Fletcher, L St Pierre and M Tham (Abingdon, UK, and New York: Routledge, 2019), 20-25, at 25.
Wall-Kimmerer, “Learning the Grammar.”
Ibid., 7.
Ibid.
Ibid., 8.
Wixon, “Whakapapa Centred Design”.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ron Bull, tumuaki whakaako at Otago Polytechnic, identifies with Kai Tahu, Kati Mamoe and Waitaha whakapapa or tribal heritage.
Connie Watts identifies with Nuu-chah-nulth, Gitxsan and Kwakwaka’wakw ancestry.
Abram, The Spell.
Donald A Schön, The Reflective Practitioner (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 1991), 76-104.
Jonathon Lynch and Greg Mannion, “Place-responsive Pedagogies in the Anthropocene: Attuning with the More-than-human,” Environmental Education Research, 27:6 (2021), 864-78, at 873.
Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, 2nd ed. (San Francisco, CA: HarperOne, 1980).
Val Plumwood, “Nature in the Active Voice,” in The Handbook of Contemporary Animism, ed. Graham Harvey (Slough, UK: Acumen Publishing Ltd, 2009), 441-53.
St Pierre, “A Shift,” 24.
Reflecting keywords identified in Keith M Murphy, “Ethnographic Design,” Society for Cultural Anthropology, 29 March 2018, https://culanth. org/fieldsights/ethnographic-design.
Roving Designers, online workshop, Spring 2021, INDD 310.
Student conversation with author, 2022.
The pioneering design and nature work of Dr. Kate Fletcher is described in her books Wild Dress (Uniform Books, 2019); Design and Nature, A Partnership, with Louise St. Pierre and Mathilda Tham (Routledge 2019); Outfitting, with Helen Mort (Hazel Press 2022).
DESIS faculty are pleased to share a series of special topics courses in the summer of 2021:
Bi-scriptual Typography (COMD 350) will explore the relationship between language, typography, culture and diversity in the context of contemporary communication design. Through a combination of discussions, readings, informal exercises, out-of-class activities, walks and observations, students will explore the possibilities of working in an inter-lingual and inter-generative space of communication design. In particular, students will explore how an idea can be expressed and modulated across different languages, scripts and cultures. A series of projects will draw upon past learning in typography and communication, with students expected to investigate various ways of gathering, assembling and analyzing visual materials and urban typography. [Reyhan Yazdani]
Decolonizing Design’s Material Practices (INDD 350)This exploratory, interdisciplinary, course invites students to reconsider assumed prototyping strategies and production processes commonly used in Design. Drawing on insights from decolonial scholarship and applying embodied making as means of reflection, students will identify and consider their own individual affinities for particular aesthetics, materials, and modes of assembly. Collectively they will propose and develop strategies for delinking from aspects of material practice that bolster longstanding and arguably problematic colonial/modernist strategies embedded in Design and the design process. Asking: how do we do? why do we do? what is needed? The aim of this investigative summer studio is to find new ways to make – meaningfully. Insights from this body of work are intended to be shared with the Emily Carr Design Community – to seed further ongoing iterative development of new Design approaches that directly address the concerns of our time. [Hélène Day Fraser, with Marcia Higuchi]
Practicing Neighbourly Responsibility (CCID 201, 301 + HUMN 300) Learning within the context place – that is, within active social, institutional and ecological dynamics on unceded territory – how might we collectively determine our learning space; critique and trouble hierarchical and exploitive structures; and take up the work of neighbourly and place-based responsibility? Drawing from mutual aid practices – responding to the immediate needs and concerns of a community, in conjunction with social movements demanding transformative change – this class is intended to be emergent and responsive, extending over the summer to better respond to needs and pace of community work, taking up the following questions:
What are our responsibilities, reciprocities and commitments to the land that we are guests on?
How can we as individuals and also as a collective take up the responsibility of contributing to the places where we are? What can each of us offer?
What would a design practice look like if it were in service of relationships?
[Jean Chisholm, Laura Kozak, Mickey Morgan]
Outdoor Practices (INDD 350) This roving* field school will take Emily Carr students to local green spaces to engage in a range of design activities that supports wellbeing, attention to nature, place-based making, and openings to land based practices. Making outdoors can inform us of our relationships to the natural world, but a practice outdoors will inherently impact everything about our way of life. Including the decisions we make and the designs we continue to privilege in our day to day. Dirty hands, wet knees, deep observation and a panoply of sensory experiences will be encouraged. Sitting, walking and movement practices will be explored. Students will create many projects, that may include earth art, Earthbound Prototyping, Design for Biodiversity**, and storytelling/story-sharing. Students will be given the opportunity to work beyond the disciplines of graphic, industrial, and interaction design. Collaborative projects are encouraged, but optional. [Zach Camozzi]
* with gratitude to the ECUAD collective, the Roving Designers for this framing.
**a long-running project of the DESIS lab, see posts on Project pages
Reference: Anette Lundebye. 2019. “To Name is to Value.” In K. Fletcher, L. St. Pierre, & M. Tham (Eds.), Design and Nature: A Partnership (pp. 86-92). Routledge.
Bodystorming immediately removes the tension from the room, and the assignment offered students the permission to laugh and contort their bodies into weird or odd positions. After a couple of minutes, most students simulated the motions of the tide with ease and comfort. Urchins started eating kelp, and starfish started eating urchins. Salmon, rockfish, otters and orcas were all introduced to the group, and predator-prey relationships were discussed. During the game, participants discovered that the reduction of otter populations indirectly led to the disappearance of kelp forest, although there is no direct predatory relationship between them.
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