Bringing Home Recursions:Co-Crafting Environmental Self-Implication in Adult Design Education
Published in: Cubic Journal, No. 4: Pedagogy, Critique, Transformation
Special issue edited by Jae Oh and Francesco Zurlo.
This report is about an explorative co-crafting course applying
the notion of recursive publics to adult learning and
pro-environmental activation, which aimed to engage a diverse
cohort of learners towards patterns of eating, living,
and engaging that promoted wellbeing and a healthy environment.
This two-month-long, university-endorsed study
in Hong Kong saw 22 participants fermenting their urine in
which to grow an edible plant (Lactuca sativa), thereby creating
a material relationship between their bodies and the
environment. Technologies were employed to bring people
physically together for greater emancipatory engagement
inside the shared material condition. When analyzed, these
technologies revealed their potential for opening or restricting
the synergies from combined purpose, expertise,
and immanent life processes in recursively profound and
playful ways. This civic-tech study offers a recursive self-implication
approach to design education as a collective negotiation
process for navigating unknown territory to converge
a myriad of expertise and intended beneficiaries.
Keywords: Co-crafting practice, civic-tech education, recursion, urine fermentation, pro-environmental activation.
Acknowledgements:: The ANTHROPONIX study was implemented in close collaboration with Sarah Daher, Benson Law, Wanho Tam, Kahang Lai, Timothy Jachna, and Po-Heng Lee. The ‘urban ecology adventure’ was made possible with an internationalisation grant from the Dutch Creative Industries NL in Rotterdam and a seed grant from Design Trust in Hong Kong. It was generously endorsed by the Research Institute for Sustainable Urban Development at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
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