Abstract
What does it mean to practice design in a world without human beings at its center? How can designers take meaningful action in a world in crisis? In this paper, I present initial findings from an experimental month-long immersion in a place humans and more-than-humans meet—a coastal wildlife refuge in the northeastern United States. I report on my experience in the field (notes, observations, and photos), reflections on my trajectory as a designer and researcher in the refuge, my evolving understanding of what it means to design with a more-than-human lens, and how my search for meaningful action led me toward ecological literacy as an approach to practice. In doing so, I offer three contributions: four vignettes demonstrating how entangled more-than-human webs reshape an experience of place, five interconnected considerations for more-than-human design, and a model for grounding design practice in cultivating ecological literacy.
Keywords
more-than-human; design practice; ecological literacy
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.1118
Citation
Logler, N. (2024) Learning in place: Reimagining design practice as ecological literacy, in Gray, C., Ciliotta Chehade, E., Hekkert, P., Forlano, L., Ciuccarelli, P., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2024: Boston, 23–28 June, Boston, USA. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.1118
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Research Paper
Included in
Learning in place: Reimagining design practice as ecological literacy
What does it mean to practice design in a world without human beings at its center? How can designers take meaningful action in a world in crisis? In this paper, I present initial findings from an experimental month-long immersion in a place humans and more-than-humans meet—a coastal wildlife refuge in the northeastern United States. I report on my experience in the field (notes, observations, and photos), reflections on my trajectory as a designer and researcher in the refuge, my evolving understanding of what it means to design with a more-than-human lens, and how my search for meaningful action led me toward ecological literacy as an approach to practice. In doing so, I offer three contributions: four vignettes demonstrating how entangled more-than-human webs reshape an experience of place, five interconnected considerations for more-than-human design, and a model for grounding design practice in cultivating ecological literacy.