Bringing Home Recursions: Co-Crafting Environmental Self-Implication in Adult Design Education

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Abstract

This report is about an explorative co-crafting course that applied the notion of
recursive publics to adult learning and pro-environmental activation. The aim was to engage a diverse cohort of learners towards patterns of eating, living, and engaging with the world that promote wellbeing and a healthy environment. The cultivation of more-than-human health concerns was explored through a two-month long, university-endorsed educational study with 22 households in Hong Kong where participants fermented their own urine for a substrate in which to grow an edible plant (Lactuca sativa); thereby creating a simple material relationship between their bodies and the environment. This civic-tech collective employed technologies to bring people physically together for potentially shaping more emancipatory engagement inside the shared material condition. Analysis reveals how it is helpful to conceive technologies in terms of how they open or restrict the reintegration of unifying purpose, diverse expertise and immanence of life processes in recursively profound and playful ways. The study offers an approach of recursive self-implication to design education as collective negotiation process for navigating unknown territory required to converge a myriad of expertise and intended beneficiaries.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)80-99
JournalCubic Journal
VolumeDesign Education
Issue number4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 30 Nov 2021

Keywords

  • Co-crafting practice
  • civic-tech education
  • recursion
  • urine fermentation
  • proenvironmental activation

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