fields

Designing across and within ecosystems

Connecting 2 events, looking for correspondence seems is an emerging tactic in these posts, and two that proved fascinating in recent weeks was the Mapping Constellations for Regenerative Design conversation at DRS2024 Boston, & guest lecture by Danielle Wilde on Growing Collaborative Futures.

The DRS Conversation with Ann Light, Prof. Andrea Siodmok OBE FRSA , Sarah Teasley Laurene Vaughan, colin gray, Laura Forlano, Ph.D., Kristina Lindstrom and Dan Lockton, asked how might we use systemic constellation mapping to represent complex societal and multi-‘dream’ holder issues that describe social, climate and economic in/justices, to better understand how design can make a difference? The conversation addressed ‘transformative futures’ by adopting an expanded position to place the individual positionality of the designer into a constellation in which their opinions of the ways the world could or ought to, come into tension with other conditions and actors (human and more-than-human) through the forming of ‘systemic constellations’. Following the 2022 Conversation in Bilbao we used bodystorming methodologies to enquire into design research positions: https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/drs-conference-papers/drs2022/conversations/5/

While the 2022 DRS conversation focused on the reflexive perspective of the designer within complex systems, the 2024 conversation asked participants to consider a diffractive approach to their design research. We used Sarkar’s Ecosystem of Wicked Problems as a starting point, and asked participants to adopt one of the problems within the system.

In contrast / juxtaposition Danielle Wilde’s talk offered a practice through an ecosystem by transforming food systems and integrating traditional knowledge with ‘modern’ cultures. Perhaps a more reflexive approach, Danielle’s research ‘cut’ across food ecosystems to address climate change, biodiversity loss, and social inequalities. Emphasising the importance of small-scale, sustainable food production and consumption, and of leveraging traditional knowledge and practices to create a more just and sustainable food system. The talk also highlighted the need for interdisciplinary approaches that combine design, molecular biology, and agroecology to explore the multi-state metabolisms of odorants and to trace the flow of nutrients & pollutants across different scales.

By placing the two events together in one post, I guess I’m asking how design researchers hold on to different ‘frames’ simultaneously 1. the system and their place within it through a reflexive lens (Wilde), and 2. their impact / affect on a system through a diffractive lens (Constellation mapping). Not easy because the problem-solving positivism that design often inherits, belies both ways of doing.

The DRS paper from this year will pop up later in 2024…