The idea of “designing for life” sounds meaningful – but what do those words mean in practice? And especially important for young people: what jobs are available in that space?
To explore those questions, the 44 people shown above met last week in Chedun Town, a rural area near Shanghai, for Design Harvests – a walking, mapping and bioregioning workshop

mistraurbanfutures.org/design_harvest_design_approach_towards_sustainability.pdf

Cities the world over have plans to green, rewild or renature themselves. Billions of trees will be planted. Street will be depaved. Facades will become bioreceptive. But when you zoom in to these plans, practical details – tangible interventions – are hard to find.

Hence the focus of this workshop in Milan. Sixteen masters students were asked to design an urban infrastructure tool, equipment, place, or experience. They were given three to choose from:
– Soil care, composting, and fermentation;
– Trees, microparks, and edible forests;
– Microbiome inspired green infrastructure – or MIGI

Their guest professor (me) was impressed by the alacrity with which these young product designers grasped this challenging brief. In just one week, they developed the tangible designs shown below.

Three takeaways here:
1. Plans being made to plant billions of trees  – but who will take care for them, and how?
2. Green infrastructure is as much social, as it technical;
3 .If your responsibilities include ecological urbanism, rewilding, or nature-as-infrastructure in a city – well, involve designers.

‘If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito”. With these words, the ‘Second City’ team introduced their design for an urban bio-tagging platform. An experiment in human-microbiotic collaboration, their design enables citizens to ‘adopt’ a microbial community that lives in a blob (shown at the top) that they place on a wall.

The invisibly small size of microbes  is a communication and interaction design challenge in itself. “Human beings rely mainly on visual perception and, in an increasingly aesthetic society, not to be seen is to be forgotten” the team explained.  Their response was twofold. First, they shifted the traditional human-centered design perspective to a microbe-centered one. Second, they made the humans’ interactions with microbes playful, and social.

team: Harper Makushla Mardi, Stefano Oberto, Laura Louise Richter, Yuchen Song
Presentation: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1_Clrbl6ho_KF7ty9yNOM93kdj6BwCk7n

A system to help insects, including pollinators, connect with unused spaces around the city. These often contain high concentrations of biodiversity. These ‘unseen’ spaces, the team discovered, contrast with the low levels of biodiversity usually found in formal urban parks (or for that matter intensively-cutivated rural landscapes) because the latter are so well ‘maintained’.

The physical component of the system is a kind of 2d vertical planter: It looks like a poster but is in fact a growing medium on which lichen and moss flourish.

A final presentation included: a map of the city making ’unseen’ plots visible; the mock-up of a living billboard on a grimy urban wall; and the selection of plants selected to populate these ‘living corridors’.

A dilemma emerged during the week: could it be better to leave bio-intense sites alone, rather than draw attention to them? For some practitioners in the ecological restoration world, the best form of rewilding is to do nothing, and let nature do its thing. We agreed to address “Do Nothing” design in a future workshop.

Team Anna Dondini, Nuño Gonzalez Rebaque, Giulio Alexander Pizzo, Sophie-Anne Néfert Val
Presentation: drive.google.com/1kKzqRkA8loPuLp_TFPx4xORZq-iC4oVN

“Our design is about rethinking what clean means”. A test kit, and supporting infrastructure, reveals just how much microbial live is on us, in us, and around us. The service enables city people to perceive these otherwise invisible microworlds (with some assistance from laboratory machines that process the test kits).

The objective was to raise awareness that the well-being of humans, and non-humans, is interconnected. But the project was not just about information. It was an embodied and relational experience. The tangible artefacts designed worked better than pure media in attracting the attention of visitors; doing the test in a public space added social energy, too.

Team: Martina Comola, Lara Lattuada, Vittoria Pagliaroni, Margherita Spairani
Presentation: drive.google.com/1xUpsLQV75hI-En_u73m0bEmEBbW75H-L

Urban environments are so dominated by human-produced sounds that we seldom appreciate and acknowledge other forms of biological activity. This project for city parks involve different senses, and especially sound, in reconnecting trees and humans.

The fast-growing fields of ecoacoustics and bioacoustics – inspired by the the pioneering work of Bernie Krause – led this team to propose soundscapes in parks that would enhance the ways we interact with local flora. The team did not, in the event, have time to create examples of sonic and/or musical relationship between music and trees – but the ideas generated combined entertainment, citizen science, and awareness-raising.

Team: Caterina Arcagni, Conor Roy Mcarthur, Gabriella Lillie Dina Miles, Shah Jenil Bhaveshkumar
Presentation drive.google.com/1BDd1xzYFFnNGw0QnV5pK6R_AGanqaUyF

See also:

Lifeworlds Reader

Blog: Ideas for the City That Cares (my review of Ezio Manzini’s new book, Livable Proximity. “A city that cares brings new meaning and vitality to a world exhausted by a focus on concrete, and consumption”.

Video/talk: From Microbe to Bioregion, Designing for Life


This talk is about design for urban biodiversity at multiple scales – from microbe to bioregion. It describes a new model of urban development: designing for shared aliveness. The implication? A new economy in which Business serves Place (or B2P).18

Blog: Design for multi-species cities 2022 (last year’s workshop) 


Featuring: a pop-up garden; a tree-sounds sampling system; an iPhone turned into a microboscope; a bird hospitality service; and a microbial museum installation

c. 2,750 BCE: The World’s oldest book, the Epic of Gilgamesh, portrays tension between the wild and the civilised in its hero, who violates the Goddess’ wishes by felling an ancient cedar forest but in consequence suffers “death” of his wild side.

500 BCE: The Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita and Buddha taught the interconnection of all things – “mutual interdependence.” Old Testaments prophets warned of ecocide (e.g. Isaiah 24) and laid out a land ethic (e.g. Leviticus 25).

300 BCE: Plato’s Timaeus (110-111) depict the ecological degradation of ancient Greece in terms that display advanced understanding. He goes on to depict the world as being “a living god” created by God eternal. Plato, however, sets reason above feeling, presents God as male in preference to female, and presumes a dualistic worldview.

33 CE: A Hebrew prophet turns recriminative violence on its head, predicating heart and hand over mere cleverness of head.

570-632 CE: Prophet Mohammed establishes Islam embodying concern for social and ecological justice (including giving rights of education, property ownership, etc. to women). The story of the thirsty dog at the well illustrates that compassion for animals mattered more than the perceived sin of adultery. Islam retains a lunar calendar. Meanwhile, in Europe, Rome has fallen and the “Dark Ages” are in full swing, but with philosophy and theology flourishing in the Islamic and Celtic worlds.

1255-1274 CE: Thomas Aquinas (and the Scholastics) reintegrate Greek rationalism (conserved by Islamic scholars) with Christianity – the start of the “Renaissance” (or rebirth) of Greco-Roman Classical thought during the late “Middle Ages.” Feudalism morphs to early modernity, and European nation states consolidate, governed by cross and sword, and directed by the compass laying the ground for later empires.

1560: The Reformation (Scotland’s date). Salvation a question of individual righteousness and not a matter controlled by the spiritual community (“church”). John Calvin “accommodates” usury = deferred gratification. Economy freed from church.

1603 CE: Advent of early modernism as the “father of modern science,” Francis Bacon, chancellor to King James VI & I, anticipates biotechnology and suggests nature’s secrets should be prised out of her like confessions are tortured from witches. Decartes (1596-1650) consolidates Platonic dualism in the rationalist mind-body split. The 17th century represents the start of “managerial environmentalism,” with royal advisors like John Evelyn urging forest conservation and regeneration to preserve timber for the admiralty, and shifting industry out of London to reduce appalling air pollution. Environment must serve the newly invented capitalist/imperialist endeavour of building an Empire. Pollution can be exported, for instance, by locating iron works in New England. The immanence of God in nature (cf. Job 36-39; Psalms 104) is downplayed; the Platonic transcendent God is emphasised. With Ireland firmly under colonial yoke since 1601, empire building expands overseas.

18th century: The “Enlightenment” era of mid-modernism as the power of reason is fully focussed into industrial revolution. Progress and salvation reside in reasonable men acting in rational self-interest – Adam Smith. The “Protestant Work Ethic” (Weber) equates material success with Godly blessing, and vice versa as applied to those on the losing side as the last of the European commons is stitched up for privatisation, and the world colonised for spices, gold, sugar, tobacco, slaves and glory.

19th and 20th century: late modernism. Massive improvements in life and world population growth. Churchill saw both war on horseback and the first atom bombs. Both production and killing become industrialised. An era of technology, advanced capitalism and globalisation in context of “God is dead” (Nietzsche).

1968: Early postmodernism: Black civil rights, Vietnam, psychedelic experience opening of inner space, women, eastern religious influence etc inspire new thought. Garret Hardin writes of the “tragedy of the commons.”

1972: An axial year. Four things of CHE-related interest.
a) “Blueprint for Survival” – editors of The Ecologist recommend stabilised populations, living within carrying capacity and processes that work with nature.
b) “Limits to Growth” – Club of Rome (Meadows’ report) uses simple computer model to show that exponential growth cannot continue.
c) The Stockholm Conference – formally, The United Nations Conference on the Human Environment with a 26-point Stockholm Declaration. This was the world’s first UN environmental conference. 119 countries agreed to set up the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), led by Canadian oil “billionaire” Maurice Strong (but don’t judge too quickly!).
d) The School of the Man-Made Future founded in Edinburgh University as a futures school and think tank, later renamed The Centre for Human Ecology (the CHE).

1980: International Union for Conservation of Nature produces World Conservation Strategy, predicating maintenance of life support systems, biodiversity and “sustainable utilization” of species and ecosystems.

1980: UN Brandt Report: North-South: a Programme for Survival, says that economic growth cannot spread without justice.

1983: Caroline Merchant publishes The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution – a core text advancing “ecofeminist” critique of modernism. (I mention this to indicate a “parallel polis”.)

1987: UN Brundtland Report – Our Common Future. Says that sustainable development – integrating social and environmental dimensions, is that which proceeds “without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

1988: UNEP and the World Meteorological Association jointly set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), destined to become the gold standard by which climate science is aggregated and evaluated in Assessment Reports (AR) roughly every 7 years. As of 2022, it is completing AR6.

1992: The UN Rio “Earth Summit”. Involved 30,000 people and 100 heads of state. Dubbed the “Summit of Hypocrisy”, but driven by the vision and energy of Maurice Strong, it laid down Agenda 21 – the agenda for integrating social and ecological justice in the 21st century (albeit within free market principles). It established the Convention on Biological Diversity, principles of sustainable development and forest policy, and of particular emergent importance, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC).

1995: COP 1, Berlin, the first of the annual Conference of the Parties, the “parties” being governments signed up to the principles of the UNFCC, the primary objective set at Rio being, “stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.”

1997: Kyoto Protocol of the UNFCC – agreement of most countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to “a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”.

2007: Nobel Peace Prize jointly awarded to the IPCC and US Vice-President Al Gore “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”.

2009: COP 15, the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, being the 15th Conference of the Parties. As Obama, Gordon Brown and other leaders gathered, initial high hopes were sabotaged as “Climategate”, cooked up by anonymous climate change deniers, burst upon the world’s press.

2015: COP 21 in Paris, salvaged the carnage of COP 15 resulting in The Paris Agreement, the most significant environmental treaty so far of the 21st century. Although lacking a binding enforcement procedure, world leaders agreed to: “Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.”

2021: COP 26 in Glasgow. For the mostpart, and particularly for the host Boris Johnson: They came. They saw. They decided not to conquer.

2022: 50th anniversary of the founding of the Centre for Human Ecology – www.che.ac.uk – 8 Oct. Symposium.

Source: www.AlastairMcIntosh.com, updated 2022 at the request of www.che.ac.uk)