FOREST & KINSHIP
Service Design as a tool for critical inquiry.
We would like to acknowledge that the City of Seattle and its greenspaces are on stolen land, traditional land of the first people of Seattle, the Duwamish People past and present and honor with gratitude the land itself and the Duwamish Tribe. Most of our thought process behind our research and design stemmed from literature on indigenous practices in regard to tending to and being caretakers of the land. These pieces of knowledge were vital to our service design approach.
COURSE
HCDE 598 Special Topics: Service Design
ROLE
Researcher, Concept Short-film, Artist
TEAM SIZE
4 people
PROJECT TYPE
Speculative Design / Future Design, Service Design
DURATION
010.01.22 — 12.01.22
OVERVIEW.
Focusing on values of non-human and human kinship, spirituality, and community, our speculative service aims to motivate humans to get lost in a forest, and ask the “what-if” questions of deepening our relationships to nature. We dream of an alternative temporal reality where humans and forests provide mutual aid to one another, with roots in indigenous and spiritual practices.
By following service design tools and practices, we took a meta-approach to service design and tested the efficacy of using service design as a tool for critical inquiry. What does ecosystem mapping, blueprinting, codesigning, and value tensions reveal about our current state of the world? What discussions does this bring up with our participants? In what ways are we lacking in our relationships to caretaking for the forests? What can we do to connect our current realities to our service’s imagined futures?
NARRATIVE TOOLS / DELIVERABLES.
Click here to view.
RESEARCH.
METHODS.
Interviews (primary research)
Participants came from a variety of backgrounds and experiences; regardless of their role, everyone had direct ties to either forest care practices or restoration work.
Earth Corps Staff Member
Burien Parks & Recreation Staff Member
Forest Pathologist/Program Director of Forest Health Watch
Professor in Forestry at University of Washington
Observations (secondary research)
Participated in a 3-hour Earth Corps volunteer session with ~20 other restoration volunteers.
Landscape Analysis (secondary research)
Conducted research on existing solutions to reforestation in Washington State.
INTERVIEW FINDINGS.
Human intervention is required and essential for healthy forest succession
Visiting green spaces or being close to one, motivates individuals to involve themselves in environmental stewardship.
Having a personal stake is key to building long-term commitment
Landscape Analysis Findings.
Overall, we noticed 3 emerging themes across solution space: 1) detection; 2) removal; 3) restoration
Current efforts to support restoration ecology range from small (e.g. community scientists) to large scale (e.g. WA State weed removal laws).
The importance of “stewardship” for restoration success is well documented in studies examining restoration in urban, rural, and wildland settings.
Stewardship often occurs in informal networks of individuals that value collaboration, trust, and the social impact of their actions.
CO-DESIGN.
Our Approach
We explored human emotions, sentiments, and values surrounding human-tree connection with our participants in two activities.
1) Guided meditation around a selected tree
2) Artifact gathering for discussion and ideation
Co-design Research Questions
What does it mean for humans to build meaningful connections with trees?
What does care look like between humans and trees?
What power dynamics exist that prevent humans from connecting to trees?
Insights
Human-tree connections need to feel personal
Human-tree connections can span generations and lifetimes
Unknowns about tree health make it difficult to provide hands-on care
Honoring trees through spiritual rituals are a less intimidating alternative for showing care
Engaging community is critical to ensuring forest succession
DESIGN PRINCIPLES.
01 — Balance values of routine, methodological, and human intervention
The environment is in no shape to restore itself. The natural cycle of forest succession has been broken. To ensure proper forest restoration and succession, humans need to care for and nurture native plants in ways that require routine maintenance, as well as temporal work (planting/removing).
02 — Interplay values of short-term restoration work & long-term impact
Forest restoration is a long process of maintenance that takes numerous years to complete; some impact cannot be seen in human lifetime. Closing the gap between long-term goals and short-term actions will be key in motivating actors to be part of the system of restoration.
03 — Embrace ambiguity
Two of the values that should be derived from our service are that of kinship and spirituality, both of which are very personal and are open to each individual’s own interpretation. Our service embraces entropy as a result of diverse reflexive approaches to the two values, and thus should encourage users to embrace ambiguity and open-mindedness.
04 — Combining Indigenous knowledge with modern science
Colonialism and capitalism play large part in marring native plant species and other spiritual elements of the land. Our service must acknowledge who the land originally belonged to, and aim to bring Indigenous knowledge to the core experience.
KINSHIP
Community
Care
Spirituality
VALUES.
Kinship, community, care, and spirituality are values that both humans and forest maintain throughout the experience of our service.
With the tension and collaboration of these values, the forest and humans are able to enact mutual aid of care to one another.
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VALUES ENACTMENT.
Lost
The forest allows one to get lost, and only through developing kinship situated in trust and care with the trees, can they truly find their way
Ritual
From Indigenous Forest management, we know that the human connection to and involvement with ecological processes are integral to the health and sustainability of the forest and all natural resources. Traditional Ecological Knowledge provided by Indigenous leaders implies that humans are connected to natural resources; they are not separate entities from nature.
Through the inherited knowledge of a specific location and its social and ecological characteristics, we will gain understanding on which trees to plant, how to care for them and how to develop a kinship between human, tree and the physical environment.
NARRATIVE TOOLS.
Because this is a speculative service, our team decided that it was necessary to include additional tools to narrate our “what-if” scenarios. These narrative tools are our deliverables for this project.
01 — Narrative Timeline
Paints a picture of chronological events that lead to the creation and maintenance of our service.
02 — Collages
Paints a picture of chronological events that lead to the creation and maintenance of our service.
03 — Video “Prototype” / Concept
Clarifying interaction ambiguity to communicate core experience of the service.
