Jack McSeveney — Critical Contextualisation of Project Work
As part of Design Studies 1 our group (Finlay Milne, Adam Hepburn and I) chose to participate in the Zoo Holocene Extinction Memorial project in which we were to commemorate rare and endangered animals by articulating the past, present and future and how this relates to their population and habitat and to raise awareness. In order to understand this, you must understand that human interaction with nature has become increasingly more detrimental to our surrounding environment for millions of years to the point now where we are literally destroying our own habitat.
Design and nature a lot of the time don’t see eye to eye with it a large portion of design having adverse effects on our planet’s atmosphere and environment and our project captures this well by allowing easy visualisation of how quick we are taking up this great rainforest home to some of the animals most exotic and endangered species. In Speculative Everything: Design, fiction, and Social Dreaming it is about design and its detrimental effect on society and the planets eco system and speculates products that question this very issue. It states:
“We need to question these ideas (and ideals) and explore their human consequences once applied on a mass scale to our daily lives. This is where design enters; we can take research happening in laboratories and fast- forward to explore possible applications driven by human desire rather than therapeutic need…We need to zoom out and consider what it means to be human and how to manage our changing relationship to nature and our new powers over life. This shift in focus requires new design methods, roles, and contexts.”
This helps to contextualize our point and project that we realise the consequences of our actions and take note on how can help to preserve these environments above our selfish needs and that we must strive to preserve nature and realise it’s place and role in being a home for these million animals that’s population is rapidly dropping.
Speculative design is a key method to helping solve this global epidemic we are facing Dunne & Raby proposed a world where nature existed free from human interference and humans could enjoy it at the same time. They state in their book:
“The communo-nuclearist society is a no-growth, limited population experiment. They live on a three-kilometre-long, nuclear-powered, mobile landscape that crawls from one end of the country to the other, straddling two sets of three-meter-wide tracks. Each carriage is twenty by forty meters, and there are seventy-five of them. The environment surrounding the tracks, like a demilitarized zone, is fully naturalized, a sort of nature paradise to be enjoyed by nature-loving communo-nuclearists from the safety of their train.” They go on to say “But mostly, like the 1930s Californian homesteaders it is a community seeking isolation on the edges of civilization, away from the detrimental effects of the Anthropocene. An ecological wilderness similar to demilitarized zones has emerged along its route where an absence of humans means an abundance of wildlife, and rare species can thrive. Anyone who gets too close is zapped with a noise cannon. Their survival requires extraordinary discipline, but to maintain mental well-being in such a confined environment, diversity is accommodated as much as is possible.”
This relates hugely to the project created for the Anthropocene memorial. This speculative design may be fictional but could be a possibility in the future if we cannot learn to control our wants and acts of mass murder in the natural world destroying animal’s homes. Our light board helps to raise awareness of this matter and cause people to act before it’s too late and speculative steps like these have to be taken. Our project criticises our human wants and not needs that we are so selfish to have to destroy millions of homes just for simple things that aren’t required.
In ‘Sustainable Design a Critical Guide’ by David Bergman he states:
“It’s become a truism that green design is a valuable and necessary goal. But it’s worth taking a few moments to establish just how important it is, before getting to what it is buildings are not the only cause of ecological issues. Blame can be shared with population growth, transportation, industrial agriculture, carnivorous diets, and our sometimes-irrational desire for ever more stuff.”
This statement shows that this Anthropocene that we are creating is a result of all sorts of things humans participate in including trophy hunting, mining, deforestation among others, which means we should really be setting limitations to what and where we can do it. Many of these animals are losing homes for simple reasons such as palm oil farming just so we can get moisturiser and shampoo etc. Design should be used in a smart way to take a step back from trying to create cars that drive themselves and other space age type designs and focus on creating a sustainable future in which nature and humans can live together. The light board that we created visualises the extent of the human activity in these areas and is frightening to think of the number of animals forced from their homes all for the sake of human evolution in the most toxic way possible.
Design and ecology are becoming more and more connected as we head into an uncertain future where ice caps are melting, the earth is heating up, habitats are being destroyed and some species of animals are on the brink of extinction, some have already become victim to extinction. This critical area of design is one that we will have to look at going forward in the future and more will have to be done including speculative design to come up with ideas to help save our eco system. Everything that humans once harvested in order to expand our economy was once plentiful but now is increasingly scarce and in order to save animals and our planet design is one of the strongest options we have in order to do so. We are relying on design to save us and going forward as a designer this is where our careers are headed as we pass through university and take part in projects like these.
According to WWF we are losing 18.7 million acres of forests annually equivalent to 27 football pitches every single minute. They state:
“About 80% of the world’s documented land-based species can be found in forests. When species lose their forest homes, they are often unable to subsist in the small fragments of forested land left behind. They become more accessible to hunters and poachers, their numbers begin to dwindle and some eventually go extinct. Even localized deforestation can result in extinctions as many unique species exist in small isolated geographic locations in the world.”
Our zoo memorial project is a good example of critical design in which it simply but effectively shows large quantities of people the damage they are causing in a surrounding in which they are there to appreciate animals that may not be here forever if they do not adhere to the light board memorial. Critical design is a huge space at the moment that is very important in communicating problems that is hard to visualise without critical design. It’s practice over the year has criticised different aspects of all life and the way we function as humans.
In conclusion, our memorial project answered critically to the brief well and utilises design to criticise greatly the disrespect and lack of appreciation for nature, our eco-system and the animals that live there in their natural habitats and homes and also portrays the increasingly rapid growth of human activity in these areas where nature is untouched and once thrived with the forest providing a large percentage of earths oxygen. Humans have for years abused and disrupted our planet through design with the use of nuclear weapons, deforestation and it’s time to restore faith in humanity and through the use of design use projects like these to draw attention to these areas and question each other. Steps in the future of the design must be taken so that we can support animals and their homes and criticise and prevent deforestation while striving for sustainability and new technologies to benefit this.
Source 1 — Speculative Everything, Dunne & Raby https://readings.design/PDF/speculative-everything.pdf
Source 2 — Sustainable Design A Critical Guide, David Bergman
Source 3 — https://www.worldwildlife.org/threats/deforestation-and-forest-degradation
Jack McSeveney
