Context:

Design researcher Kirsi Hakio worked with the custodians of Elisaari island in Finland to develop a set of ‘awareness-based’ service design methods that help people to tune in to their inner worlds and think of themselves as connected to wider ecosystems. Elisaari island sits off the coast of Helsinki and is accessible to the public for recreation from May to October. Although it is owned by the city, it is managed by an entrepreneurial couple, who run nature-based tourism services there including a café, boating services and camping facilities. Hakio was interested in working with these custodians to develop new services. However, she soon found that traditional service design methods couldn’t adequately account for the island’s main stakeholder: nature. She began exploring new techniques to connect with Elisaari’s human and non-human stakeholders.

“Mainly it’s inhabited by the non-humans, the animals the plants, the nature – they really own the place, and then people come part-time in the year.” – Kirsi Hakio

Connections to eco-social sustainability:

Hakio is interested in the inner dimensions of sustainability: our personal modes of sense and meaning-making that we each carry around with us, which deeply influence our everyday choices.

“Our inner world really animates our actions…our inner conditioning and mental models and the worldviews that we have – even though we may not notice it, they effect how we behave, how we make decisions how we encounter others – humans and non-humans” – Kirsi Hakio

Hakio created a series of co-design workshops that brought together stakeholders from Elisaari to help them to recognise and share these unspoken assumptions. At the first workshop she trialled awareness-based exercises that asked participants to become present and observe what was happening inside their minds and bodies. This was followed by dramaturgical exercises where participants used their bodies to take on different roles and to act out scenarios for future services, which enabled participants to visualise and share their own inner lives and orientations with the group.

Transformative creative practices:

The second set of workshops took place on Elisaari island and focussed on generating empathic connections to the non-human stakeholders. A series of walking meditations helped participants to connect more deeply to the place. Hakio also asked participants to assume the role of animals, trees, historical figures and nature spirits from Elisaari. She then interviewed the participants in character using classic service design questions, asking someone acting as a deer or a rock how they would ensure repeat customers. All of these activities were designed to give participants the experience of being deeply connected to a wider ecosystem of which they were one part of a larger whole: an experience of the ‘ecological self’ (Bragg, 1996). 

“Participants see themselves as part of this interconnected worldview… and I think in that state they want to start changing their behaviour… they are having experiences that are very difficult to explain to others maybe of connectedness and of connecting to the place.” – Kirsi Hakio

However Hakio notes that the challenge in sustaining these motivations beyond the workshop experience.

“when participants enter home it’s really difficult to maintain because the environment is completely different… It’s really difficult to turn those experiences into actions… I see how the custodians of the island are living in that kind of state all the time. So I’m not sure if we’re supposed to be in that bubble for a longer time – because usually we don’t have time and resources – or if we need to build our communities differently.” – Kirsi Hakio   

In the later phase of the Elisaari project Hakio worked with the island’s custodians to develop co-design techniques for the orientation of new employees. These helped the group to co-create shared values that subsequently went on to influence the working culture of the island. Awareness-based approaches provide ways to intervene in the interactions between people and place, by opening up space to articulate different mental models and bring alternative worldviews into being. Hakio’s work challenges us to think about how awareness-based methods might be used beyond service design to prompt cultural and social change. What might we need to change about our material and social worlds for people to act as their ecological selves all the time? 

Nominator:

“We were walking through the forest in different roles. I walked with someone who was a sheep…I had to think through the nature materials and how we could bring that into the catering….it was more or less play around with the idea, but it was such a change maker to my, my thinking is, I’ll never forget.” – Tuuli Mattelmäki

Project credits:

Funded by Aalto/Department of Design.

Learn more:

Hakio, K. (2021). The New Paradigm Is Already Here: The Practicing of Prototypes of Future through Vertical Alignment. Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change, 1(2), 73-94. https://doi.org/10.47061/jabsc.v1i2.939

Hakio, K., & Mattelmäki, T. (2019). Future skills of design for sustainability: An awareness-based co-creation approach. Sustainability, 11(19), 5247. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11195247

Nocturne is an iterative and collective project while at the same time originating from a personal impulse. Inspired by portals, imaginaries, spirit worlds and the unseeable – it celebrates more-than-human species that we share the earth with. 

Living in an urban environment during the pandemic spurred many outdoor walks, jaunts, journeys, explorations and observations. Driving through the xx valley I had a vision of a secret altar hidden high up in the mountains that could be accessed only via foot. Rather than asking humans to gather indoors in an art space, I wanted to bring people to site-specific locations that were ecologically significant. I was also interested in the casual and serendipitous encounter – the surprise a hiker might experience to find a favorite trail suddenly occupied by a glowing, living altar. I wanted to punctuate the experience offered by ‘nature’. 

The aesthetics of Nocturne altars are important to their functioning. They are light, semi-translucent sculptures made of beeswax – as a sustainable alternative to plastics – with attached LED solar paneled lights. As the sun fades, the lanterns illuminate at dusk, forming a beacon in the dark and enticing viewers from afar as they notice a soft glow emanating from the trees. The sculptures thus generate a serendipitous moment in which the passerby notices the sculptures’ light first. The altars each spark a distinct sensorial experience: the way the sunlight backlights a native plant species at sunset; the sound of the birdsong at sunrise; the scent of jasmine leaves opening as the day cools into night.

“This pause and break in their typical movement patterns and speed are meant to lead to a moment of deeper observation of the network of more-than-human species around them. Generating this embodied experience aligns with relocalization practices, and subverts the hierarchy of intellectual versus embodied knowledge present in Western epistemologies. To come back to our bodies is to come home, and in this case to come back to the more-than-human entanglements that we are a part of. “

– Isabel Beavers (2021)

Upon spotting a wild altar, spectators also notice a QR code that has been placed. That allows them to read more about the project, and directs them to put their device away, listen, observe, and spend a few moments noticing and recognizing the lives of all of the other species that surround them. Once the first encounter with an existing altar has been made, it depends on the audience’s will and daily routines whether or not they return to the altar.

“The hope is that they plan to return or think of the altar when moving in other urban wilds throughout the city. This becomes a ritual, as participants return to the altar multiple times, or are inspired to create their own altar. This might deepen their awareness of the more-than-humans around them, inspire them to learn more about the local ecosystems, and lead to a feeling of wellbeing, connection, and eventually attunement to one’s community.” 

– Isabel Beavers (2021)

The Nocturne project is an experiment in care-taking, new rituals, and a seduction into intimate moments with the more-than-human world. The practice of generating new ceremonies and rituals with more-than-human species serves as a method of re-localization, de-emphasizing the human-human connection, and re-emphasizing the grounding impacts of human-more-than-human interactions. The network of altars operates as an economy of care – visitors to the interventions are responsible for upholding the integrity of the site, both in the more-than-human species that inhabit it, as well as care-taking of the art piece and altar.  

Within the CreaTures project scope, Nocturne has been showcased on several public engagement occasions. Participants of the Nocturne Altar Hack: Wild Designs for New Eco-rituals workshop at the CreaTures Feral track at the 2021 Uroboros festival discussed the possibilities of building altars in their diverse geographical locations. Participants were broken up into small groups to brainstorm how they might create a wild altar – what materials would they use, where would the altar be, what would eco-ritual would emerge from the intervention? This online workshop entangled participants from many parts of the globe and provided an enriching dialogue around ritual, ecology, and adaptation. 

The second workshop Co-Creating Wild Altars organised at CultureHub’s ReFest involved participants in creating small light sculptures at the artist’s home studio. Twelve participants joined and created their own small altar. They took these home to place in their own home environment. Participants learned the process of creating these small wax sculptures and dedicated their altar to a new eco-ritual they hoped to enact. 

The Nocturne: Sea Altar installation created for the Atmospheres Deep exhibition in the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art with SUPERCOLLIDER offered glimpses into the depth of ocean creatures’ entanglements. The installation includes 7 light sculptures, an audio-generated animation, and a sound piece. The animation is projected onto the ceiling of the gallery to mimic light coming through the surface of the water down into the water column. Nocturne: Sea Altar honors the ocean through a multimedia installation incorporating audio, audio-reactive visuals, and light sculptures. The work meditates on the criticality of sea diatoms for life in our oceans and asks us to engage in a practice of deep listening to ask: what are more-than-humans telling us?

An iteration of Sea Altar was further produced for the showcase at Sui Generis: Debates about the Singular exhibition, SOLA Contemporary, CA. The altar was adjusted for the space and incorporated new larger sculptures. The Nocturne Wild Altar showcased over six months on the Radio Walk Stairs in Silverlake, CA then invited passersby to experience the altars in their own time and pace. The author took participants, mostly local neighbourhood residents, on several guided tours around the diverse altars installed.

The Nocturne is an ongoing project. Upcoming exhibitions and events include a Nocturne Sea Altar showcase at the Symbiosis: Sculpting the Art of Living Together exhibition, CultureHub LA; starting on July 9th, 2022.

As complex ecosystems, forests provide an environment for living and dying for many species: they are places of refuge, myths, folktales, and sensorial pleasures but also sites for control and industrial extraction of natural materials. The modern, western traditions of forest management and environmental policies tend to see forests as a resource to be leveraged to improve human lives – for example, through timber yields and stocks or carbon sink cultivation. Increasingly, and particularly in urban environments, forests are used to protect – not all but a small number of select – humans from perils of ecological disasters such as high temperature, ozone, and other health-related consequences. In these challenging times, there is an urgent need to better understand, care for and imagine better forest futures.

The Open Forest project aims to provide a space for co-creative engagements with such imaginaries, by inviting diverse forest creatures, including forest dwellers, Indigenous forest guardians, healers, scientists, data managers, artists, designers, as well as dogs and trees, to walk together and share their stories. The walks are performative and open-ended, centered around the elements of spontaneity, surprise and curiosity: we walk both physically and remotely, together and apart, sometimes in actual forests and sometimes through data-based representations of them, guided by various human and non-human navigators with good knowledge or sense of local landscapes. Through these multi-disciplinary and multi-species encounters, we hope to better understand how various stakeholders make sense of forest; questioning what can constitute a forest dataset, how it can be produced, and by whom while shifting the focus towards experiential insights shared by diverse walkers.

Since autumn 2020, we have walked with multiple forests in various parts of the world, including a highly instrumentalized forest field station in Finland, an urban forest in Australia, a protected forest area in the Czech Republic and forest gardens, or chagras, in Colombia.

In Finland, the creative work and research are situated in Helsinki and its surroundings (e.g., Sipoonkorpi National Park ) and in the Hyytiälä forestry field station in Juupajoki. Facilitated by designers and researchers from Aalto University, the first seeds of the Finnish part of the project were showcased in the A Bloc shopping center space, where we worked for six months (November 2020 – April 2021) and interviewed various forest stakeholders including forestry researchers, tree physiologists, artists, and forest data managers about their relationships to the forest.

Following the A Bloc installation and interviews, we have been organising a series of forest walks inviting both physical and online participation. The first five walks took place at, and were physically broadcasted from, the SMEAR II station in the Hyytiälä research forest. Two of these SMEAR II walks were performed as part of the 4th Research Pavilion Helsinki where they were accompanied by workshops and a week-long public exhibition. During the walks, we narrated stories of the SMEAR II station, showing details of sensors and other research instruments that gather data about various exchanges between trees, soil, and the atmosphere.

Participants were invited to reflect via a group discussion and share their own forest stories via the Feral Map, an online interface enabling exchanges of diverse more-than-human data. The initial version of the Map drew upon Urban Forest open data maintained by the City of Melbourne and later grew to include tree datasets from Helsinki, Vienna, Barcelona, Central Bohemia, and the SMEAR II station in the Hyytiälä research forest.

In Australia, the creative work is situated in Melbourne and facilitated by designers and researchers from RMIT University focusing specifically on open and alternative data generated within the local urban forest – a complex ecosystem of more than 70,000 trees each with unique IDs.

The RMIT group has co-creatively developed the Feral Map, which was launched as part of their shapeshifting More-than-Human Dérive portal engaging people in playful ways of sensing and listening to perspectives of diverse forests and forest creatures. Inspired by the Situationist International’s artistic strategies, the portal invites people to drift and “drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there” (Guy Debord).

More-than-Human Dérive proposes that, through drifting, we might augment sensing and knowing what surrounds us to include more-than-human stories, ‘voices’, and perspectives by exploring new ways of mapping with expanded, multisensory ideas of data. The first Dérive took place in May 2021 at the Melbourne Knowledge Week and invited driftings through the Melbourne Urban forest. The second Dérive happened at the online Uroboros 2021 festival, as part of the CreaTures Feral Creative Practices program track.

In the Czech Republic, we have walked with a patch of forest in Central Bohemia, in the protected landscape area Křivoklátsko, which presents a unique ecosystem with a mosaic of species-rich habitats. Sixty-two percent of the total 628 km2 area consists of broad-leaved and mixed coniferous forests and contains a high species diversity (about 1800 vascular plant species alone and 84 native species of trees, shrubs, and other creatures). 

The Bohemian walks are guided by Chewie the dog – a creature with extensive sensorial knowledge of the local forest landscape. We follow Chewie as an experienced forest navigator, trusting his instincts and sense of direction, drifting through forest places, spaces and situations that we might never discover otherwise. We walk without a map, letting Chewie decide where he wants to walk: we walk-with and wait, what will come our way. The point is to see what can we learn as humans if we give up on our control over our movements through time and space and try to attune to a rhythm and interests of a non-human creature.

To document our drifts, we experiment with the OsmAnd map tracker, getting gpx outputs with details of each drift’s distance, altitude range, time span, and average speed. More importantly, however, we sniff, listen, touch, and observe the local surroundings carefully. This more-than-human approach to forest-walking has revealed some experiences that would otherwise stay hidden to us, like the easiness of not measuring time and not following any roadmap, or the reinvigorating effects of rolling in the comfortable soft moss bed that spreads all over the forest floor.

In Colombia, the Open Forest walks take place in Bëngbe Uáman Tabanoc, on the eastern edge of the southern Colombian Andes. Tabanoc is the ancestral territory of the Kamëntŝa people, what is known today as the Sibundoy Valley.  The valley is surrounded on all sides by steep mountains, and usually covered by clouds and abundant rains, its waters are funneled into the valley, forming the headwaters of the Putumayo River, a major Amazonian tributary. There is an incredible plant diversity in the valley, partly explained by its unique geographic context. 

Open Forest walks in Tabanoc are guided by Kamëntŝa women, who are known for weaving colorful patterned sachets called tšombiachs. The belts document – in intricate and complex ways – stories and environmental knowledge of the territory and their relationship with their forest gardens past and present.

In November 2021 – February 2022, some insights from the unfolding Open Forest experiment in the above-mentioned forests are showcased at the Data Vitality exhibition organised by Aalto University (FI). In June 2022, we are showcasing our Open Forest elements at the CreaTures Festival in Seville, and in September 2022, we follow with an exhibition at the Designs for Cooler Planet event organised as part of the Helsinki Design Week. In the meantime, we are working on the interactive Open Forest Catalogue compiling all the forest-stories, observations, and insights collected throughout the project.

The Open Forest project creates an occasion for playful encounters and lively discussions about forests and related environmental issues such as climate change. We aim to reach beyond discussing these issues in theory and bring them on a local, personal and down-to-earth scale. The project is ongoing and we keep walking – see the News section below for upcoming walks as well as documentation of past events.