Design Resilience | Future Forecasting

DESIGN RESILIENCE: ENGAGING CHILDREN IN ECOLOGICAL ACTIVITIES USING PLANT BIOACOUSTICS

Preferable Futures Forecasting | Ecological Citizenship | Speculative Design

RCA DF: Design Resilience Course

We are in a world that is rapidly changing, evolving and transforming conventional norms. New technologies are empowering communities, new materials are reducing their impact and new interactions offer multiple design opportunities. Keeping up with this pace, how do we as design futurists envision future sustainable technologies

and systems?

Envisioning future technologies, or rather ‘Public Interest Technologies’ is a way of ensuring all technology, not

just digital but also manual are created ethically and responsibly. These technologies are created/refined for

public good.

These technologies contribute to ‘Ecological Citizenship’. Ecological Citizenship is defined as “transcending consumerism, undertaking challenges: impacting culture, enacting sustainable change and empowering resilience. Ecological Citizenship is embedded within communities large and small, urban and suburban from all social classes” (Phillips et al., 2020).

For this course, we were tasked with looking at Public Interest Technologies, not just how they look prima facie but ask questions about why they were created, where did they come from, who created them, what challenge are they trying to address. This challenged our imagination from looking at things as they were, to what they could actually be, or lead to - from what is to what if…?

This is an exploration of the intersection of Speculative Design and Preferable Futures to envision and accelerate Ecological Citizenship.

The methods used were the Future Wheel, Stakeholder Mapping and Technology Roadmapping.

Which object initially sparked my interest?

Green Walls!
Captivated by London's majestic green walls, I found myself deeply inspired by their role in addressing the city's pressing environmental challenges. These living structures, vital in combating air pollution, flooding, and declining biodiversity, are key to achieving our net zero goal by 2030. However, their grand scale sparked a question in my mind: How can we bring this powerful concept of nature integration into the more intimate scale of our homes? This led to the inception of my research, aimed at creatively infusing living, growing elements into everyday home environments while engaging the entire family. This is just the beginning, from here I branched out.

Image credits: Dezeen | the Rubens at the Palace Hotel

The Intervention Point is around creating positive and sustainable interactions between people and their natural environments, nurturing a deep-rooted commitment to environmental stewardship. Educating children early cultivates a lifelong habit of nurturing nature. This early engagement instills an innate ecological consciousness, guiding them to adopt and champion practices, business models, and ecosystems that are diverse, sustainable, and restorative as they mature.

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