Design Future | Research Through Speculating The Future of Biodiversity
In the design future unit, I have chosen the theme of Biodiversity, trees and green spaces. Our aim is to propose services and policies for the future that will improve green spaces and contribute to tackling carbon emissions, while increasing biodiversity and promoting health and well-being.
Introduction
“How should biodiversity be maintained or even increased in the next 10 years?”
“What is the non-human perspective on biodiversity?”
“Who has the right to design nature?”
Before LCC (London College of Communication) started the Design Future unit, my understanding of the future was pie in the sky: humans moving away from Earth to make new homes on other planets in the universe… However, this type of thinking is selfish and we didn’t reflect on why we were so eager to find new places to live. The above question comes from the latest speculative design project in collaboration with the MA Service Design program and Southwark Council.
Southwark Council has declared a climate emergency in 2019 and is willing to do everything possible to make the Borough carbon neutral by 2030. They have developed a strategy and want to work with local stakeholders to ensure this is achieved faster than currently envisaged. Therefore, we are committed to research and exploration targeting biodiversity. Over the past seven weeks we have been on an intense and exciting design sprint to create a tangible future through a speculative design and Research-Through-Design approach that will stimulate discussion on how biodiversity will exist in the future. The most important thing is to reflect on how we should make changes in the current situation.
Initial Research
Our team’s journey began with the receiving of a brief and the practice of horizon scanning. With biodiversity at the centre, we spread outwards and looked at a wealth of secondary research and current news, designed to help us find the key points, insights and trends that could influence the future. We have scanned a number of different areas such as politics, economics, environment and technology, as well as local and global multifaceted events, and we have explored several interesting and provocative points of opportunity that are linked to biodiversity. From Southwark’s Borough Plan 2020, we find that governments have a very narrow approach to maintaining or enhancing biodiversity. Humans always see nature as a resource to be used by people from the perspective of their owners, and dominate flora and fauna limited.
If we follow the current trajectory of carbon production, the future doesn’t look very good. So as a system designer we need to change, we need to think and design for the future to ensure that we have the plans to unlock some of the damage being done and slow the rate of climate change. Therefore, we need to first figure out what the importance of biodiversity is.
The importance of biodiversity
The greater the amount of biodiversity, the stronger the ecosystem and the better it functions and adapts to change. Studies have shown that all species other than humans, large and small, help keep forests stable (Stand For Trees, 2020). Healthy forests store carbon, host animals and support communities. Diverse places make everything better, and more biodiversity improves soil carbon stocks. Rich vegetation can store twice as much carbon as a plantation of just one species.
Policy
After the first declaration of climate emergency, the council has tried to improve the climate by providing financial support, voting on priorities and enacting new policies, although these are still only a small piece of the grand puzzle. For example,
- Southwark plans to plant 10,000 new trees by 2022
- Closing more roads, creating green zones and greening our roads and high streets
- The Greener Belt will link open spaces from Burgess Park to Canada Water providing space for nature, leisure and relaxation
However, this did not satisfy the campaigners, but was met with a lukewarm response from them, who even saw acts such as planting trees as nothing more than a way of filling a historical void.
Social
To celebrate Climate Action Week, Walworth has created a miniature park designed to create an informal shared green space. Cabinet Member Johnson Situ said he hoped the miniature parks would help attract more residents to join the collective effort to make the whole area a happier and healthier place to give back to our planet. And yet, it still drew some disagreeable views and ridicule from social media users.
“You can argue over what flowers to put in parklets, but what is the point when you can’t see the woods from the burning trees,” Caoimhe Basketter said.
A non-human view of biodiversity
We learnt that Southwark had a detailed and comprehensive plan for enhancing biodiversity. As mentioned above, however, the current policy and methods are limited, mostly from a view of humans. Whenever there is talk of biodiversity or carbon emissions, people naturally think of planting trees. The nature can be partner of human rather than be treated as people’s property. Is there therefore a good way to really question this type of plantation policy?
Creating a preferable future is not just about human actors, but non-human actors as well. Thus, we have currently demonstrated our interest in non-humans within the area, for example, thinking about plants and animals having their own “roles to play”. In addition, communities are not just places where people live, it is also home to all manner of animals and plant life, serving as a space for biodiversity within a settlement area. We also want to highlight the environmental issues associated with non-human creatures living in the city.
“I think, if anything, I’d like people to reflect on the urban environment. If the urban environment itself can impact the behaviour of a variety of wildlife species in unanticipated ways, what ways do the spaces we create for ourselves impact our own behaviour?” (Lanthier, 2020)
Take Aways from Research
Both humans and non-humans should be part of this society as a whole. Careful and inclusive discussion and planning should precede any major environmental project. It’s a really important thing to highlight that we see biodiversity as a separate kind of non entity and actually these are residents as much as we are with our communities.
From the very beginning of the project, our tutors told us to turn the research process into a design process by using a Research-Through-Design approach instead of simply thinking, and encouraged us to do hands-on work to explore and research in depth. As my team and I were not familiar with this method, we decided to summarise and understand all the insights and concepts that came out before we made them. We built up some what ifs and backstories linked to the future to get inspired to think again about our way forward. We used the fictional newspaper format, through which others would gain a better understanding of the most relevant aspects of our ongoing work. It is also a way to complete the synthesis of the key signals of change and opportunity identified in the horizon scanning. We also intend to use the fictional newspaper to ‘create the world’ by situating services, helping us to understand what new services will exist in the world that have not yet been designed.
Future policy recommendations
Then, how do we get there and what will the relationship between humans and non-humans be like? We have therefore listed a series of future policy goals for different aspects:
- Community — Wildlife will be part of local residents and have an equal right to live with humans in the urban area. Making the whole of southwark a park borough.
- Government & Organisations — Avoiding a narrow-minded consultation focussing on activities and space. Value nature for what it is intrinsically, think about the right to nature and the relationship between human beings and nature.
- Humans — Giving human residents a new perspective to look at the existence of creatures around, and establishes a positive relationship with non-humans. Making nature accessible for locals.
- Non-humans — Enjoy the life in Southwark and increase number and type of wildlife species.
Future Concept Development
The act of research, design and production requires us designers to face different confrontations: between different background knowledge, between interdisciplinary disciplines, and even between the utopian world and reality. Hence, we identified our biggest challenge is Make nature available in the urban area. At the same time, as Stappers (2013) illustrates, eliciting provocation is also a particular cognitive exercise, one that can make people aware of potential needs and intangible values. Thus, we still wanted to provoke: if all decisions are made by humans, are there any views and opinions from a non-human perspective? If not, then is the decision really objective and inclusive enough?
Co-creation
From a service design standpoint, it is important to bring people together for an equal exchange and dialogue, to share their demands and ideas about their work, so that a consensus and balance can be reached in the discussion. We therefore needed to carry out a cross-team workshop, and we used one preferable future scenario as a starting point for our brainstorming session to help us explore how we could achieve this goal.
In fact, we got stuck at this stage of the project. After the co-design workshop, we ‘came up’ with a large number of ideas, but they seemed to be scattered in different directions. From the start of the project, the tutors encouraged us to SHOW, DON’T TELL, but we still talked too much. Although this helped us to broaden our thinking and explore the possibilities of the prototype, it was easy to see that after getting stuck once, we could have started working on the object much earlier and got out of it much quicker. In the meantime, there is another problem that comes along with this. We have not thought about approaching under the goal, we have rushed to narrow down and ignored the role of each stakeholder in order to achieve our objective.
Luckily we had the chance to brainstorm offline again and the two tutors helped our team map our scattered concept ideas together, helping us to clarify our thinking and providing some very fascinating insights. At the same time, with a lot of encouragement and advice from our tutors, we decided to stop thinking ‘in-kind’ and start prototyping, and we hypothesise a final what if:
What if human residents have a new perspective on the existence of the creatures around them and ensures that humans conviviality with non-humans?
Ideation
It was exciting to see that after a few presentations, our focus was approved by both the tutors and the council staff. The next step was how to reach this powerful assumption. With the principle of harmonious coexistence between humans and non-humans, it is extremely important to emphasise the following points:
- Humans of Southwark co-existed rather than dominated non-humans.
- Humans of Southwark had a shared responsibility to increase biodiversity.
- Explore what would be the responsibility of citizens, developers of new buildings, schools, local authority, etc.
E. Zimmerman (2003) pointed out that one form of research can be design, or that design and research are to some extent the same, as both activities can generate new knowledge. So on this basis we tried to build a platform that would bring everyone together under the council — BioMetropolis. The vision is to establish it as a platform for equal dialogue between humans and non-humans. We use this platform to develop new policies and guidance, recruit volunteers and publish activities and events such as Bio-Watch (more on this later), to make people living in the Southwark area aware that all people should be jointly responsible for increasing the biodiversity of the area by changing the perception of non-human species and that humans should co-existed with non-humans, not be their masters.
Bio-watch
Bio-watch is one of the projects in the platform that can call on residents to get involved. Neighbours come together to support and make positive and safe connections between individuals and non-humas to maximise Southwark’s biodiversity. Bio-watch would ensures that humans and non-humans co-exist in harmony. Experts and residents from different fields can join in and simply discover and observe the health of plants and animals around them in their daily lives. Plants, animals and micro-organisms have no direct say in the current system. Non-human interests should not depend only on charity. Through this project, people will be able to experience first-hand the way of life of non-humans in Southwark, allowing them to build empathy for non-humans. We will then try to ‘communicate’ with non-humans, and non-humans will take on more diverse forms, we may not just see and hear them, we can feel and smell them. At this stage, our focus is on increasing the presence of non-humans in society. Here are three accounts of experiences from Bio-watch volunteers:
User prototype & feedback
We took our concept to a local park to see how the residents in the park would react. We received a lot of different feedback suggestions that will be important for the next iterations of our work. Most of them were expected and some of them were unexpected to us. Some experts told us that developers of new buildings are in fact hugely influential in enhancing biodiversity — how should they assess the impact on the environment as they develop? Some felt that it would be a great experience for children in the family to be involved. Others think we should guide people and build up a basic knowledge of how to co-exist with non-humans.
One of the interesting things I found at this stage was that in the speculative design project, the interaction with the public and the testing of prototypes was not about improving the user experience and iterating on the product. Rather, it is about using user reactions to guide and stimulate our feelings and discussions about the future, and to provoke a shift in stakeholder behaviour in the future. I think this is one of the joys of the project challenge of this unit through the Research-Through-Design approach: we can learn about the life of the user, about a technology, about a new mechanism or form, about how to build an effective prototype or how to evaluate it in a design project (Giaccardi, 2014).
New behaviours and roles
Let’s see how the stakeholders work. We use a round table diagram to illustrate how the different stakeholders shift their identity in our service concept and the new behaviours they possess.
- Resident / Bio-watcher——Observe non-humans in everyday life, gather relevant information avnd understand the situation.
- Community / Connector——Identifying defects, improving problems and acting as a bridge of communication.
- Expert / Communicator——Speak out on behalf of non-humans and help them make their voices heard. Provide new points of opportunity and professional support.
- Develop / Facilitator——Assessing the impact of development on the environment and discovering the values, benefits and interests from it.
- Local authority / Enabler——Driving platform development, sequencing and time allocation. Opening up a new opportunity for increasing biodiversity.
Objects
Based on the feedback we received and with the encouragement and advice of our tutors, we decided to create a narrative of our concept of the future by means of a series of photographs. We wanted the viewer to be able to experience the scene in an immersive way that would resonate with the participants. We decided to focus the story on a new resident who had just moved into Southwark and received a welcome package with letters, leaflets, seeds bags and other objects. Also, describing BioMetropolis and southwark is very valuable for biodiversity and will also inform residents about the current challenges，and it calls on our new neighbours to join in the fun. By combining this narrative with the object we have created, we aim to provoke the audience to react, feel and respond to living in a future that is focused on increasing biodiversity.
Conclusion
With economic and industrial development, the goal of carbon neutrality cannot be delayed. Maintaining and even increasing biodiversity is one of the most effective ways to do this, sustainability is a concern for society as a whole and we need to always question the need to make changes. Just because we are presented with the future we envisage, it does not mean that it is necessarily so, and a better future surely awaits us. However, I still believe that the new ideas and content above can have a positive impact on society and that this will be a preferable future.
Reflection
When I first came across this unit, I thought we would be depicting a ‘science fiction’ when I heard the name design future, but when I learned about speculative design, I realised that we were in a ‘design novel’. This means that there needs to be a constant link between reality and the future we envisage. In this project journey, we use speculative design as a narrative tool, trying to bring the future back to the present and thus provoke discussions and reflections on life.
Strictly speaking, this is my first formal encounter with speculative design, and in the above I have reflected on some of the differences in approach between speculative design and service design. On the one hand, I see service design as highly structured and organised in terms of complexity, while interacting with users in many ways. The service design approach entails improving the service in an iterative phase to make the product more user-friendly. On the other hand, and also embodied in this unit, speculative design entails building object that can carry a possible future scenario, where we create a vision of the future through an understanding of current situations and trends. Our role as designers is more that of authors than facilitators.
But in fact the two disciplines or professions should complement each other, they can both provide viable solutions to objectives in the short or medium term, and even testimonial advice and plans in the long term. Through this project experience, I think it is very useful to put speculative design in the framework of service design. For example, can we try to include a speculative design approach before the first and third stages of the two-diamond model? It is a matter for thought and reflection to address both user needs and a longer term vision of the service.
References
Crowley, S., Hinchliffe, S. and McDonald, R.(2017). Nonhuman citizens on trial: The ecological politics of a beaver reintroduction. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 49(8), pp.1846–1866.
Dunne, A. & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative everything: Design, fiction and social dreaming. London: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Iadarola, A. and Starnino, A. (2018). Speculative Design and Service Design: A False Dichotomy. Touchpoint: Designing the Future, 10(2), pp.48–53.
Southwarknews.co.uk. (2021). Southwark Council announces £101 million for climate action — but do their plans go far enough? |. [online] Available at: <https://www.southwarknews.co.uk/news/southwark-council-announces-101-million-for-climate-action-but-do-their-plans-go-far-enough/> [Accessed 18 May 2021].
Southwark’s Borough Plan 2020–22
Stand For Trees. (2021). Biodiversity & Ecosystems: Building the Foundation | Stand For Trees. [online] Available at: <https://standfortrees.org/why-it-matters/biodiversity-ecosystems/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=biodiversity%20importance&utm_campaign=NPM-SFT-WhyItMatters&gclid=CjwKCAjwjuqDBhAGEiwAdX2cj1Cuh0RLFW4AcotvRJurIMt_bas6ObuiuHDt-qjbSuCGQ5bGtxADaBoCYE4QAvD_BwE> [Accessed 18 May 2021].
Stappers, P. and Giaccardi, E. (2021). Research through Design. [online] The Interaction Design Foundation. Available at: <https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the-encyclopedia-of-human-computer-interaction-2nd-ed/research-through-design> [Accessed 18 May 2021].
Stappers, P. J. (2013) Prototypes as central vein for knowledge development. Valentine, L. (Ed). Prototype: craft in the future tense. 85–97.
Starik, M. (1995). Should trees have managerial standing? Toward stakeholder status for non-human nature. Journal of Business Ethics, 14(3), pp.207–217.
Tackling the Climate Emergency Together. Southwark’s strategy to become Carbon Neutral by 2030, July 2020
