First launched on Chongming Island near Shanghai in 2008, by Professor Lou Yongqi, Design Harvests is an in-situ exploration of how rural innovation and development can be revitalised by design using an ‘acupuncture approach’.

In last week’s workshop – as part of the launch of Design Harvests III – a quarter of the group were urban-rural professionals with some kind of design background. Their number included a “Rural CEO’’, a “Rural Learning Centre Principal”, a “Rural Project Coordinator” and so on.

My contribution was to talk about unusual but real-world but jobs that are now emerging in rural contexts: jobs in food and water systems, building re-use, agritourism, next-generation hospitality, and the use of AI in social infrastructures. You can see the (one hour) talk here.

Our next step in Design Harvests will furnish our physical hub in Chedun Town with equipment, information, and people. As the interface to a physical-virtual knowledge ecosystem about all things urban-rural, the will help diverse actors in the territory learn from each other.

Then, later in the year, we hope to organise a three-day ‘semi-nomadic festival’. This will feature pop-up events distributed around the territory – for example in a farm, at the market, in a factory, by a river.

Each evening, we will all meet together in a central location; eat together in an informal food festival; and discuss, with each other, what we had seen and experienced that day. On the last day, everyone will share what relationships they planned to establish, or strengthen.

The following text is my keynote talk at last week’s World Design Cities Conference (WDCC25) in Shanghai. At that same event I was astonished – and delighted – to be awarded the Frontier Design Prize (linkedin.com/thackara_i-was-given-the-frontier-design-prize-by-activity). This talk (video below) is a fair summary of the work being recognised by that award.

Our theme at this conference covers a lot of ground: “From Green Design, to Ecological Design”. It builds on the DesignS Manifesto we signed on this stage last year: sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii

I will come to that big picture story, but my main focus today will be on a pragmatic question. It’s one that I know concerns many of students and professional colleagues sitting here today. “Ecological Design: sounds nice – but guess what: I need a job”.

Or, If you’re from a company, or city hall, you’ll probably be thinking: “ Ecological Design. Those are pleasing words. But what do they have to do with growing my business, and our city?”

Please judge this talk by the degree to which I address those questions!

To begin, I need begin with a few words about the context of our back story – the transition from green design, to ecological design.

Green design, at its heart, has always meant “do less harm”. And we’ve tried diverse ways to do less harm over the last 60 years.

“Minimize environmental impact”. “Reduce waste”. “Reuse resources”. “Recycle products” .“ Green growth” . “Regenerative …’ – well, right now everything seems to be regenerative…

Over those “do less harm years”, and as public demand for action grew, many big companies responded – to a degree.

They invented a bunch Key Performance Indicators so they could measure progress: Net Zero; Cradle-to-Cradle; Circular Economy; Carbon Offsetting; Green Finance.

Those KPIs, in turn, spawned a multi-billion dollar consulting industry. Consultants designed an array of sustainability metrics, and then made more money in the business of sustainability reporting.

Biodiversity and carbon offsetting, were an especially clever bait-and-switch trick. Here’s how it worked. The bait? Investors were enticed by evocative images of an ecosystem getting healthier – which is great. The switch? Somewhere *else* in the world – off-camera – a company continued to burn carbon and/or destroy #biodiversity – secure in the knowledge that its activities have been ‘offset’. That’s it.

But all this “do less harm” activity distracted our attention from a problem. We were doing less harm inside an extractive and energy-intense economy that, over all, was growing exponentially.

People called it the Great Acceleration. The Great Acceleration was propelled upwards by a rocket fuel of intensive energy use, material extraction, and debt.

So I conclude my introduction with a painful reality check. Despite our good intentions, and intense efforts, the result of “doing less harm” – in an economy growing exponentially – is that more harm is being done to the planet, today, than when we started.

So that’s why green design – “do less harm” design – could never be our final destination.

It’s best thought of as a warm-up period leading to a more profound transformation that’s already under way.

This new economy is based on these simple statements:

• When our places get healthier, so do we;
• The health of people, and place, are a higher form of value than money,
  or GDP;
• Caring for place creates value.

It’s taking us a while for us to absorb the consequences of ecological design. But let’s not beat up ourselves too much. When Copernicus announced that earth revolves around the sun, and not the other way round, it took our cultures, schools and institutions another 100 years to adapt.

So that’s my introduction. I’ll now tell you about activities in four branches of an ecological economy that already involve substantial design inputs, and will soon need many more.

Ecological restoration, also known as earth care, involves a wide array of activities: watershed restoration, tree planting, soil repair, and other projects in which our environment – our lifeworlds – are being repaired in practical, hand-on ways.

In rich countries, at least, ecological restoration now provides more jobs than mining, logging, or steel production combined – all while improving the heath of the environment, instead of destroying it.
ecosystemmarketplace.com/ecological-restoration-25-billion-industry-generates-220000-jobs/

Millions more people around the world do this kind of work as volunteers. There’s a vast Pro-Am army out there that cares for its places – and rivers, and watersheds, and oceans – in practice.

A lot of this work is unknown to the broader public, and to most designers. Here in China, for example, an astonishing 3,700 wetland restoration projects have added over one million hectares of wetlands since 2012. New laws have been passed to protect wetlands, swamps and mangroves. More than two thousand nature reserves, and nine hundred national wetland parks, have been established. news.cgtn.com/26th-World-Wetlands-Day-What-China-has-done-for-wetland-conservation

Few of these projects advertise for “designers”, by that name, it’s true. But most restoration budgets include a requirement to create services, jobs, and livelihoods – the kinds of work that social innovation designers have been doing for years – at least in cities.

Community-based ecotourism, and education, are familiar urban-rural examples. But, as we discovered in the Urban-Rural festival in 2019 (slideshare.net/slideshow/urbanrural-exhibition-shanghai), dozens more jobs are emerging from the ground up.

New jobs in the textile sector, wellness tourism, and cultural services, have long been overlooked, but are now gaining serious traction.
blogs.griffith.edu.au/asiaiion. nsights/china-green-finance-status-and-trends-2024-2025

A second branch of the ecological economy is also low profile – in its case, because it caters for the most prosperous 1% of the world’s population. It’s called the Wellness Economy.

I did not realise until a week ago, for example, that, as I read in Vogue magazine, “regenerative farming is the latest wellness travel trend”.

Babylonstoren, in South Africa, is a startling example. This 200 hectare working farm has been described a “the Versailles of vegetable gardens”. For $500 and upwards a night you can stay among all this edible botanical beauty, live slowly for a while, and pamper your body in a super-luxury spa.

But high-end agritourism, to its credit, is not just about self-pampering spas. Babylonstoren also offer dozens of workshops and learning experiences. Their focus is on heritage crafts – from cutting and curing venison, and making vinegar, to leather work, bookbinding, and the basics of ironmongery.
babylonstoren.com/workshops

High end agricultural tourism is not much preoccupied with social justice, it’s true, but it’s a pretty large niche within a range of activities devoted to ecological restoration.

According to its trade body, Global Wellness (globalwellnessinstitute.org) is a hefty $6.3 trillion dollar economy. As well as Wellness Tourism, like that farm in South Africa, extensive ecosystems of people are engaged in wellness Real Estate, Spas, Springs, Complementary Medicines, Healthy Eating.

All of these involve work for designers.

High-end wellness agritourism, like that farm, may be niche for the riche, but agroecology – also called ecological agriculture, or natural farming – matters to us all.

The world’s small-scale farmers – including at least 250 million here in China – feed the world a with less than a quarter of all the word’s farmland.

With their a closer relationship with their land than remote ‘production agriculture’, they also steward 80% of the world’s biodiversity.

This is why, if public health & wellbeing are indeed the centre of an ecologiocal economy, then the world’s 1.6 billion small scale farmers are, for me, the most important health workers in the world. https://apcnf.in/

Can they fare better? Of course. The design opportunity, now, is to search for small practical ways to improve one aspect of the natural farming system.

Now for many design people in cities, their first thought has been about technology – and there’s a lot of excitement about AgTech as a potential market. Last year there were 5,000 agtech startups in China, more than 6,000 in India.

But there’s been almost zero participation by the world’s small scale farmers in this so-called innovation boom.

But here’s a thing. These ‘everyday experts’ are not anti-tech. Peer-to-peer, open source knowledge exchange is widespread in this movement,

Indeed, a new grassroots movement, Grassroots Innovations Assembly
(GIA gia-agroecology.org) has identified three pathways ways to enhance agroecology, using tech:

• Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) systems and frameworks;
• New market pathways for the products of small scale farmers;
• Facilitate the co-creation and exchange of knowledge on agroecology.

Social innovation has a huge role to play in natural farming. Ecological agriculture is as much a social movement as a biochemical one – and, for me, the most dramatic impact of technology on food systems is a social one: putting farmers in direct contact with the city people who eat their produce.

Another example is fashion

For 35 years the “sustainable fashion” movement has struggled to find workable solutions – and we have largely failed.

Circular systems. Regulation. Renting. Recycling: Their effect has been marginal. A focus“do less harm” has been overwhelmed by a Great Acceleration in the material and energy throughputs of the global fashion system as a whole.

But there is one positive development we can build on: bioregional fashion systems. This is when fibre reproduction (plants and animals), design, processing and use, are integrated with land, soil and watershed care.

The Fibershed movement is by now a tried and tested example of this emerging synthesis. Check out, for example, Pennsylvania Fibershed. https://pafibershed.org/

In the USA, the Safe Clean Water Program: safecleanwaterla.org, allocates multi-million dollar budgets for infrastructures to mitigate droughts, heat, floods, and wildfires.

Until recently, it was well nigh impossible for ordinary citizens to choose what project to do, obtain permissions, or secure funding. Often, such information already exists – but in a multitude of specialised databases and municipal offices.

In Los Angeles, the Living Infrastructure Field Kit, is a free tool for L.A. residents to plan and fund local living infrastructure projects. livinginfrastructure.org

The tool can be used to map out rainwater capture for community garden, for schoolyards, parks, or green streets,

The Living infrastructure Field Kit provides a single point of access to 65 of the most detailed datasets available across L.A. County – normally known only to professionals. The Field Kit provides access to regular citizens through an intuitive interface.

Building on this work one of its designers, Steve Daniels, is now working on companion project – Terrain – that he says is a “tool for ecological intelligence”.

Terrain helps planners, land trusts, fire councils, and watershed groups target interventions to heal landscapes.

As with the Field Kit, Terrain integrates a deep library of geospatial datasets. But instead of requiring advanced GIS skills, you can simply ask questions in natural language—powered by LLMs.

EdenX is a digital platform, based on artificial intelligence, that enables more than human modes of dialogue about rivers, and their rights.

2024.xcoax.org/pdf/pestana.pdf

For me, Eden-X is an example of nature connection in which AI – as a medium of experience and learning – can enable relationships that reconnect man and nature.

In addition to being a platform for dialogue, EdenX works as a decentralized and self-managed deliberation and decision-making tool in which all stakeholders can make proposals and vote on proposals made by others.

This conversation you see here was displayed in a spatial setting that allowed viewers to be immersed in the fluid, watery universe of the assembly.

Here, AI re-awakens our capacity for ecological thinking – the ability to see the patterns of life as a connected whole in which we humans are a part.

This functionality is literally vital: The greatest challenge of our time is to foster widespread awareness of the hidden connections among living and nonliving, things.

https://biologyofwonder.org/sharing-life

image: China has carried out more than 4,000 wetland conservation projects – including urban ones. AI, satellite imaging, and remote sensing are revolutionising the stewardship of these crucial ecosystems

Good data are important if we are to understand and reverse the destruction of nature that’s so distressing to us all. And it is good news that more and more data about biodiversity is becoming available thanks to the marvels of satellite imagery, DNA analysis, and other data analysed by AI.

But is artificial intelligence enough, on its own, to drive the ecological transition we so desperately need?

My key point today: AI can be a support for transformational change. But a truly just transition will only happen when, in the words of Raimon Pannikar, we “see nature differently, relate to nature differently, and understand our purpose here differently”.

Seventy five years ago, in 1944, the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov published his First Law of Robotics. It stated: “A robot may not injure a human being nor, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm”.

Around the world, numerous groups have puiblished ethical principles for AI. By one estimate, 172 statements have been published so far. China’s version is aligned with most of the other statements: AI should be re-oriented in the service of human good.

If we think of Artificial Intelligence as a kind of robot, then Asimov’s law could easily be updated: “AI may not injure a human being nor, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm’.

There’s been more disagreement about implementation of such a law. How can we ensure, experts ask, that AI systems will understand what we mean? Do what we want? This question, too, has a history. Back in 1960, the mathematician Norbert Wiener asked, “Are we quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which we really desire?.”

That one word – ‘purpose’ – highlights the core dilemma that I will focus on today.

Because even if we could be sure that AI would understand and obey an updated Asimov law, such a law would only mention “what’s good for humans” . There’s no mention of all the other life forms we share the living planet with. This humans-first approach has had catastrophic consequences throughout the industrial age.

Even before AI came along, “what’s good for humans” helped shape an economy that extracts vitality, as well as resources, from the planet’s living systems.

This cultural disconnection – between the living world, and the economic one – explains why we either don’t think about rivers, soils, and biodiversity at all – or we treat them as natural ‘resources’ whose only purpose is to feed “the economy.”

The idea that “the economy” exists in a separate domain from life itself sounds crazy when you say it out loud.

By the same token, It makes little sense to discuss the purpose of AI in isolation from the bigger picture of life on earth, and our place within that.

President Xi alluded to the need for a larger purpose just a few days ago. In a speech about the Belt and Road Initiative, he called for a “new development paradigm”.

This idea – a new concept for development – is for me the best place to start in any discussion of where and how we use AI.

New development paradigm

We need to ask, first: What are the social and ecological objectives of development? and, within that framework, How can AI help us achieve them?

For me, “new development paradigm” means development that helps all of life thrive – not just human life. It means: Enable natural systems to endure. It means: Beneficial relations between ecosystems.

How would AI help us achieve this?

I believe that AI – used together with science, design, and art – can be a medium of experience and learning that can help us realise that nature, and the economy, are not two different places. Everything in the living world is connected

AI can support a learning process that re-awakens our capacity for ecological thinking – and help us “see” the life that surrounds us – but invisibly.

There are positive developments along these lines in the worlds of AI and Machine Learning.

In 2019, Machine Learning heavyweights from GoogleAI, Deep Mind, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, ETH Zurich and others published this 111-page report “Tackling Climate Change With Machine Learning”.

Their report included a comprehensive list list of “Climate change solution domains” . These range from remote sensing, to the rededsign of financial markets.

It’s a long list, but one theme united these experts: If we’re going to manage the climate crisis – if we’re going to find “solutions” – then we need more data” !

Global demand for environmental data was supercharged two weeks ago at COP26 in Scotland.

Mark Carney announced that 130 trillion dollars in climate finance commitments had been promised by various financial actors. The mysterious acronyms he used disguise a lot disagreement about what counts as climate finance, what the money is for, and who gets to spend it.

But Carney made one point clear in plain language: this money would prove hard to distribute in the absence of metrics and verification.

Carney’s announcement can only increase the search for climate disclosure metrics. A.I. is being promoted as a global observation platform that monitors ecosystem health at multiple scales – from the planetary, to the microscopic.

Planet Labs, on a larger scale, have deployed a swarm of Earth-observing satellites that can monitor every forest, every tree, and every city block, everywhere on Earth, on a daily basis.

This real-time ecological dashboard, say Planet, can enable forest managers to see the signs of deforestation as they are occurring – as opposed to long after.

Its satellites can also spot but also detect the precursors of deforestation they say – such as the establishment of illegal roads that tend to appear before trees are illegally harvested.

Another big project, Microsoft’s AI For Earth, give people the power to make accurate climate predictions using artificial intelligence tools.

In England, researchers at Exeter University are training AI systems to classify all this raw data – from sensors on the ground, in the sky, or in space.

Integrating data and information from multiple, inter-related, sources, they claim, affords better understanding of complex interactions between the climate, natural ecosystems, human systems, the economy, and health.

In Switzerland, the Crowther Lab has launched an open data platform, Restor, that connects everyone, everywhere, to local restoration.

Restor connects people to scientific data, supply chains, funding – and each other – to increase the impact, scale, and sustainability of restoration efforts.

“We believe that anyone can be a restoration champion” they say, “ including you”

Bird research is also being transformed by Artificial Intelligence. The BirdNET platform, for example, combines bioacoustics with an AI based algorithm to automate bird species recognition from acoustic data.

Citizen science has radically expanded the scale of data collection: birdwatchers have contributed than 140 million observations

In Germany they use eDNA metabarcoding to analyse the health and diversity of insect populations.

Soils are the most complex microbial ecosystem we know. A single teaspoon of healthy soil may contain thousands of species, a billion individuals, and one hundred metres of fungal networks. The soils in forest ecosystems, especially, are a foundational part of the global carbon cycle. But to most of us in the modern urban world, they’ve been invisible and uncared for.

Julian Liber studies the rhizosphere – the soil around the root of plant where microbial activity is especially high. Helped by AI, he tracks fungal hyphae – their rate of growth, how often they branch, and other metrics.

The number and vitality of worms is another good indicator of soil health. Thanks to machine learning, observations from diverse sources can now be used to make diagnostic maps.

Fish farming is investing heavily in sensors and AI tools. Some of these systems can even even monitor what they eat.

Another agricultural process, composting, transforms organic waste to nutrient-rich manure. But composting infrastructures tend to be installed away from residential areas. This makes tending to the compost heap a tedious task.

Thanks to compost monitors, Internet of Things, and AI, composting has now become a more viable as an urban activity.

The scale and scope of biodiversity sampling is being expanded dramatically by small, low-power computing devices, advances in wireless communications, and data-recognition algorithms in the field of machine learning. AudioMoth, for example, is being used to understand the world of bats in real time.

These efforts are vital in efforts to prevent another Covid. Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences are using AI-supported bioacoustics to plot the distribution of bat species.Their aim is anticipate any danger of ‘spillover’ – from wild into urban – as a result of habitat disturbance by human activity.

But let me return to the core issue of PURPOSE of AI and the new development paradigm mentioned earlier.

The restoration of ecosystems damaged by decades of extraction is surely central to that over-arching purpose. AI, here, can play a important role in identifying restoration options that diversify the local economy, and create jobs. For example, the use of fiber crops to remediate degraded land and provide future livelihoods.

In Australia, where numerous mine sites are being rehabilitated back to their native ecosystems, eDNA metabarcoding helps ecologists determine what insects, pollinators, and bacteria used to live there, and so what should be planted there, next.

Add all these experiments together, and the tools and connectivity are within our grasp, today, to monitor every patch the vital signs of of the planet in real time.

We could repurpose the giant screen used by Alibaba to monitor sales during Black Friday. We could feed in data – from satellites in space, to microbial communities surveyed by eDNA.

We’d get a wondrous insight into the health of planet – place by place, patch by patch.

But there’s a dilemma here. A new dashboard is not the same as a new system.

On the contrary. For most if the world’s economic and political actors – the ones that will spend $100 trillion of climate finance announced by Mark Carney – the climate crisis is not a system failure – it’s a problem of management, efficiency, and control.

All those promises to plant billions of trees? A Yale study found that 45% of these trees, planted “efficiently”, will be monocultural plantations – managed as cash crops and devoid of biodiversity.

That’s the problem with the dashboard idea. It frames the living world as some kind of machine to process “natural resources” and “ecosystem services”.

Returning to Mark Carney again: that tsunami of climate finance could actually increase ecological destruction.

Demand for carbon offsets, net-zero, and nature positive credits, is escalating. And in order to meet this demand on a large scale, investors demand standardised metrics in order to simplify and speed up verification.

But biodiversity is the literal opposite of standardised.

The best indicator of biodiversity health is diversity, continuous adaptation, and change. The health of an ecosystem lies in the vitality of interactions between its component species.

The study of living systems tells a consistent story. Whether it’s sub-microscopic viruses, mosses, and mycorrhizae – or trees, rivers and climate systems – science has confirmed an ancient wisdom: All natural phenomena are not only connected. Their very essence is to be in relationship with other things -including us.

The health of the soil, microbes, soil, plants – and the health of people – are a single story. Diversity and adaptation are the best indicators of vitality.

No matter how massive the datasets and simulations created by AI, computational models cannot comprehend the complexity and interdependence of ecosystems. They will remain just that: models of reality.

The bank Credit Suisse, with remarkable candour, has put it best: ”biodiversity is the anti-commodity”.

This is bad news for an industrial economy that that treats raw materials as commodities.

In an industrial system, efficiency and control are success factors. The system demands uniformity and standardisation. Diversity, of the kind found in healthy nature, makes the game impossible.

And this is why climate finance could make things worse.

Every social and ecological context is unique – but finance needs the living world to behave like a machine – like the tree plantations I mentioned earlier.

The inherent complexity of nature is confirmed by real-world restoration projects – especially in the world’s critical zones. To monitor their vitality, scientists have established critical zones observatories throughout the world including this one in China.

Yes, they use sensors and highly technical instruments to collect data in these outdoor laboratories. But making sense of this complex data involves multiple skills.

AI can help with interpretation, but the story on the ground remains complex.

As well as the diverse scientific disciplines, ecological restoration can often involve dozens of organisations. This social and organisational dimension further intensifies the complexity.

And as my colleague Professor Lou Yongqi has explained, social systems are just one among four that we have to contend with: Nature, Human, Artificial, and Cyber.

As well as involving multiple systems, real-world ecological restoration also involves multiple timescales.The timescales of restoring land, measured in decades, are way beyond the ultra-fast tempo of financial markets that can be measured in milliseconds.

If finance needs nature to be machine-like – but nature is not a machine – how best are we to respond?

I believe designers are well-placed to help us cope with this tangled dilemma .

Learning from the last 50 years, it’s surely clear that we don’t need more messages, concepts, instructions. What we need, and what we yearn for, is connection – connection with each other; connection with place; and above all, connection with the living.

Designers can use their creative skills to represent social and natural systems immersively. In so-called ‘system in the room’ intallations, we humans can experience being part of nature, not outside.

The word, experience, I believe, is key. AI, as I’ve shown, can provide extraordinary data and insights – but something more is needed to awaken the experience of interconnectedness.

Design-plus-AI can be a medium of attention – such as with ecosystems we have neglected; a medium of connection – so we don’t just look; a medium of relationship with the living world that can persist through time

Beyond Calculation

The destruction will stop when we stop thinking of the oceans, fields and forests as ‘resources’ or ‘solutions’ – and start thinking (and acting) in them as lifeworlds.

Making that shift is the basis of a new way to measure and create value, and therefore purpose. That’s why we need to experience the health of a place, and of the persons who inhabit it, as a single story.

Such a change of course requires ecological literacy, and a whole-systems understanding of the world. AI, art, design, I believe, can help us acquire these skills and understanding.

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