Nature as Religion

WORK 01

Nature as Religion

As a run up to COP26 on 1st November, UK govt service Verify as part of its identity verification, asks for your religion – You have Nature as a choice, which on selecting it as your religion, you are given a further choice to select your family from humans, animals, plants and non-humans. You can choose where your new family is located from your garden, public park to local woodlands or all of the above.
You visit your new family and make sure their home is nice and welcoming for them and you to live and share the space together. Many people have found much solace in nature during COVID, unfortunately that also increased the amount of litter in the parks to unprecedented levels. With nature as religion, it is against their religion to litter parks and followers are encouraged to keep parks clean for their human and non-human family. There is a petition you can sign to get the UK government to recognise Nature as religion by Nov 1st 2021 for COP26.

WORK 02

The “Why Design?” conversation.

A series of posters and a short film covering questions, conversations and insights from the Residency. The aim was to be present in the real world and participate in conversations outside the echo – chamber of design from attending a church sermon, going to the zoo, meditating with a Falun Gong protester to speaking to kids outside Great Ormond Hospital on below questions originally posited by Humberto Maturna when asked about sustainability, he and Francesco Varela challenged in their book Tree of Knowledge that instead of focussing on the what and how to being sustainable – we need to ask ourselves :

1. Why are we worth sustaining?

2. Who are we?

2. Where do we come from?

4. Where are we going?

5. What connects us back to life?