As part of the design of the MA Service Design course at the London College of Communication, for this module we worked with Southwark to create Sustainable Futures for Southwark. I chose the theme of biodiversity and formed a group with Ran, Raven and Ming who were also interested in this topic.
2030: A Visible Future
Before this course, I thought the key words associated with the future were ‘innovative’, ‘imaginative’ and ‘cool’. In fact, my concept of the future was very vague. During the second week of the design sprint, my team was lost and we came up with a lot of wild ideas, such as wearing translators for creatures so that we could understand their language, which sounds interesting, but why would we do that? Why do we need to understand the language of creatures? What exactly is our provocation?
During the Easter holidays, my team reviewed the previous courses together and with the help of the tutorials, I got a different understanding of the future of design. 2030 is a visible future, we are not imagining an ideal world and we don’t need to solve existing problems. We should provoke the status quo based on research into the status quo and help the region IMAGINE the future.”How the world could be” not “How the world is”.
Speculative design: Creating a dialogue with the future
Marion talked about Speculative Design as a tool to inform Service Design and create a dialogue with our future(s). In retrospect, this is a good illustration of the relationship between speculative design and design future. Speculative design requires us to constantly ask ourselves what impact our designs will have on the future, prompting us to consider a range of possible futures in order to find a preferable future from possible to preferable.
After the horizon scanning research, we couldn’t help but think that at the moment, when it comes to increasing biodiversity, governments think of planting trees, and put forward a huge number of trees as a target. But what is the real meaning behind this quantitative target? How much do these trees really contribute to biodiversity? How does the government view the presence of these trees? How do residents see themselves in relation to these trees and the creatures?
Communities need increased biodiversity to increase the stability and resilience of ecosystems. Then the community is not only a place where people live, it is also a home for all kinds of flora and fauna, a space for biodiversity within the settlement area. I wanted to highlight the environmental issues associated with non-human organisms living in the city, Can creatures also live in cities as residents? “I think that, if anything, I want people to reflect on the urban environment. If the urban environment itself can influence the behaviour of various wildlife in unexpected ways, in what ways do the spaces we create for ourselves influence our own behaviour?” (Lanthier, 2020) What would happen if we saw these creatures, also as inhabitants of the area?
Thinking about the rights of non human
After the team members were all interested in the direction of non human, we conducted a new horizon scanning research to understand the context of non human from six perspectives. The part I was responsible for was to search for international perspectives/examples of non human. The section on non human rights got me thinking.
Animal rights
“The Non Human Rights Project (NhRP) is a non-profit organisation in the USA that protects animal rights and seeks to change the legal status of at least some non-human animals from property to personhood. Their groundbreaking work challenges an ancient, unjust legal status quo that treats all non-human animals as “things” without rights. The organisation emphasises that animals are like human rights, “Humans are not the only animals entitled to recognition and protection of their fundamental rights. “
Plant rights
After learning about what the Nonhuman Rights Project does, I couldn’t help but think that they fight for the rights of animals because they feel that animals are sentient, but what about plants? What is the status of plants, “without emotional expression”, on this planet?
Natural rights
Upon further research I found that Rights of Nature is a legal and jurisprudential theory that describes the inherent rights associated with ecosystems and species as similar to the concept of fundamental human rights.
At first glance it seems fair to fight for the rights of non-human beings, but in fact we don’t know what these non-human beings are thinking, people are thinking according to their sense of self. But the ideas in these are enlightening to me, they seem like they are being thought through speculative design. It is questioning the identity of non human existence and the relationship between non human and human.
These relationships are not about treating nature as property according to the law, but about recognising nature in all its forms of life as subsistence and as a rightful partner with which humans can develop. How do people go about maintaining relationships with non-humans? How does our thinking and consciousness change when we have a new perspective on the creatures around us?
