Cumulus Shanghai Conference 2010

Young Creators for Better City and Better Life

Hannah Jones and Rachel Wingfield will be presenting a paper about MetaboliCity under the theme of Sustainability and Social Innovation at the Cumulus Shanghai Conference in September 2010, as part of the Shanghai World Expo 2010 and Shanghai Biennale.

The conference will explore where and how a young generation of designers can, through their talents and responsibility, improve our environment and life in a creative way. The missions and visions of design education, design research and practice for young creators, together with the economic, political and social impacts will also be discussed during the conference.

The conference is organized into the following subthemes:
- Create for Sustainability & Social Innovation
- Renaissance of local wisdom in globalization
- Activate the conversation between old & young
- Redefine the social-economic roles of design discipline

Abstract:

MetaboliCity: How can design support the cultivation of place in the city?

As part of the sustainability agenda there is growing interest and re-valuing of the importance of localized food production in cities such as London. This paper presents the findings from a one-year (October 2008 – October 2009) participatory design research project entitled ‘MetaboliCity’. This project explored how designers can intervene sensitively within local urban food growing communities by providing a design thinking and crafting to help to sustain these initiatives and catalyse larger positive changes in the surrounding environment. The project was based at Central St. Martins in London, UK, facilitated by the design research group Loop.pH and funded by the Audi Design Foundation.

The aim of the project was to create, test and adapt a customizable urban grow-kit at a selection of sites in London. A design team guided local participants through a collaborative set of envisioning, crafting, planting and documenting processes. A metadesign approach was adopted to manage the complexity of such a task. Metadesign is a systemic, multi-disciplinary and emergent design process aimed at transcending existing specialist boundaries to create more joined-up solutions for the benefit of society and nature.

This paper will introduce the project outcomes, a set of design tools and approaches to nurture ‘knowledge ecology’ between designers, experts and different communities of food growers in the city and support the cultivation of place.
(H. Jones)