Design Intelligence #10: Embodied ecology
Research notes on tech, ecology, design, and design futures. This time: it's a whole mood.
The idea: Climate cognition
For the past couple of years, one of the most present trends in literature has been climate fiction: novels that are set within environmental collapse. Previously set in the near-future and speculative in style, cli-fi now often takes place more or less today, with climate chaos as the constant backdrop.
Science fiction writer Bruce Sterling has described the 2020s as “a decade that feels the need to marinate in its own distresses”. Cli-fi does this, sometimes subtly and sometimes not, but makes its stories interesting by foregrounding the emotional context of its characters as they live through the Anthropocene.
In his new book, Exhausted of the Earth, Ajay Singh Chaudhary makes the point that this emotional context - our embodied response to ecology, as we bear the consequences of changing it - is rarely considered with nuance in non-fiction; in environmental studies, news reports or activist campaigns, for example. “Aside from ecoanxiety (an overwhelming disquiet about environmental crisis) and solastalgia (the distress caused by the environmental changes where you live, causing a kind of homesickness), how we feel, a more “inchoate” sense of exhaustion, is missing from a lot of climate texts, he says.”
This is starting to change. This month, a poll of hundreds of climate scientists by the Guardian found that almost 80% of respondents - all of them IPCC contributors - expect the planet to warm by at least 2.5°C this century. Almost 50% are expecting a rise of at least 3°C. The scientists’ emotional responses to their expectations were starkly foregrounded in coverage. “I could not feel greater despair over the future,” said Gretta Pecl, Professor in Marine Ecology Fisheries and Aquaculture at the University of Tasmania.
The Climate Psychology Alliance seeks to cover some of this emotional ground. Its research explores psychological responses to the climate crisis, including climate denial, disavowal, eco-distress and climate injustice, drawing on psychotherapeutic approaches to build understanding and support, help people to cope, and enable transformation.
A growing field of study, called climatological neuroepidemiology, is meanwhile looking at how the experience of living through climate breakdown is affecting our health and physiology in other ways. Evidence is growing to link global heating and worsening pollution to - among other things - rising rates of anxiety, depression and PTSD. Over the next decades, climate chaos will intersect with other society-level health factors, such as increasing rates of Alzheimer's, in difficult-to-predict ways.
As the world heats, cognitive performance will change on a global scale: people become more aggressive and experience more brain fog in hot weather. “We’re in an experiment ourselves, with the brain chronically exposed to multiple toxins,” says neuroscientist Burcin Ikiz.
Innovative ways to make use of climate emotions are likely to emerge, from the activist to the design-focused. Some will be self-guided: Ginie Servant-Miklos, an educator at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, is using psychedelics (psylocybin, LSD, DMT) to manage her eco anxiety and enable sense making and lasting behavioural change. Other approaches will be collective and communal.
But at every pace and at every scale, noticing the psychological impact of climate breakdown as we internalise it - and anticipating the greater neurological changes that lie ahead if we don't address it - could turn out to be one of the most powerful ways to build the motivation to act now.
🔭 My work
I had the pleasure of being involved in the early shaping of the new Future Observatory Journal. Issue 1, on Bioregioning, is out now
📄 Research notes
We have the solutions. When buildings in one LA neighbourhood were painted in solar reflective paint, the ambient temperature dropped by 3.5F over the course of one year
“We’re nowhere near peak stuff”: Amanda Mull on consumerism (American and beyond) in The Atlantic
Synthaesthetic artist Shane Guffogg hears colours. His new exhibition in Venice showcases this, translating his paintings into music
Submersive, an immersive spa by the co-founder of experience design innovators Meow Wolf, will open in 2026 in Austin
As OpenAI’s GPT-4o launches, initially with a female and “flirty” persona that has now been ‘paused’, Parmy Olson reviews why gendered AI is always a bad idea - and usually really sexist too
👌🏼 Interesting products
SwingSesh’s fitness playground set is designed for children and adults to use together
California-based start-up Nimble connects users to repair artists locally, picks up their household goods to be repaired, and delivers them back to them
Fellow x Great Jones’ electric blue kettle understands the interplay between kitchen ritual and aesthetic value
🥽 Watching
3 Body Problem (Netflix) has one of the most compelling depictions of virtual reality that I've seen on screen