Design Intelligence #19: Deep green
From rewilding to deep time walks, deep green experiences invite people to immerse themselves in and as nature, and are prompting new thinking about human impact and legacy.
The idea: Eccentric ecocentrics
Many of the patterns of change in how people are living in this decade - what we’re designing, buying, and consider to be aspirational - trace back to the fact that we are living through a time of collapse, both environmental and geopolitical. We are increasingly ‘collapse-aware’ - but this is not an entirely new feeling. As writer Rosie Spinks has noted, the “hazy feeling of collapse” or “the sense that something about the way we live is coming to an end” was preceded by a growing and more general feeling that “things are not working any more”, and that feeling has accompanied people aged below 40 for the majority of their lives.
In environmental psychology, shifting baseline syndrome refers to a gradual change in norms that people become accustomed to as the environment degrades. For example, young people will accept as normal a lack of stars in the sky or a lack of butterflies in a garden, because it is all they have known, while older people will be aware of the loss. This awareness is triggering a scramble: as nature changes at a faster rate than we are prepared for, causing solastalgia and a host of other climate emotions, there is a growing sense of urgency to see what is left, while it is still here.
A range of deep green designed experiences are emerging as a way to absorb the natural world, and place ourselves within it, in experimental ways. Gardens are being rewilded into biodiverse green spaces, while parks have become places in which we can walk in empathy with parakeets. Foraging has become popular as a way to self-educate within nature, and to feel a little more self-sufficient should a worst-case scenario arise. (The practice even has its own TikTok influencers.)
For people seeking perspective, deep time walks offer a way to situate the self within 4.6 billion years of Earth history, via a 4.6km walk that takes around one hour to complete. The beginning of the walk marks the creation of the planet, while by the end, human milestones such as the Industrial Revolution speed by at such a pace that they are barely noticeable. Co-created by the late British environmentalist Stephan Harding and geologist Sergio Maraschin, the walks help people to understand just how recent humans are, and to absorb the speed and scale of our impact, in a different way to reading about it.
In travel and hospitality, deep green retreats immerse people into wildness. Based in Australia, the UK and NZ, Unyoked specialises in sleekly-designed off-grid holiday cabins that provide privacy, seclusion and space for contemplation. The company describes itself as “the ancient remedy for modern times”, its gift vouchers styled as ‘nature prescriptions’. Majamaja, an off-grid retreat in Helsinki, is similarly focused, promising that guests will wake up to the sound of seabirds and gently rolling waves.
Deep green experiences bring with them the promise of escape, if only temporary, but also of protection. As well as immersing in nature, they are preparing for a future. There are hints of a prepper mentality threading through them, as if people are rehearsing for a doomsday that may or may not come.
Deep, a new project in Wales that aims to build a “permanent human presence” under the sea by 2027, has suitably apocalyptic overtones. Funded by an anonymous investor, Deep is currently being developed in a flooded former limestone quarry. Its units will reside 200m underwater, allowing scientists to study marine habitats in greater detail. In design, preparation and funding, Deep is going much further than similar projects have managed to. “The goal is to live in the ocean, for ever. To have permanent human settlements in all oceans across the world,” chief operating officer Mike Shackleford told The Guardian.
📄 Research notes
“Self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century in America.” Lone lifestyles have become more common - in America and beyond - and that has implications for everything from social psychology to politics
Writer August Lamm gave up her smartphone two years ago. She has founded the Center for Archaic Networks, which aims to “take back the human network” and pursue a world in which “relationships are once again unmediated and unmonetized”
A job title that points to a hopeful future. Solar entrepreneur is a growing career path in Zambia and Malawi as solar-powered devices start to need fixing
British gas network SGN has started a neighbourhood-scale trial of ‘green’ hydrogen, supplying it for heating and cooking in 300 homes in Fife, Scotland. The trial aims to “act as a catalyst for regional decarbonisation”
Colour semiotics can tell us about futures thinking too. Mindy Seu, author of the Cyberfeminism Index, writes this about the rise and rise of Internet Green: “machinic intervention into nature and its subsequent destruction often yielded bright green: Soylent Green’s people-as-food, Fresh Kill’s radioactive sushi, Jenna Sutela’s slime molds as models for Silicon Valley. Green has always represented nature; bright green, however, is nature destroyed.”
🔋 Interesting products
Cooking sticks that offer “mankind’s oldest tool” (literally a wooden stick) in sleek, well-branded form
Researchers at EMPA in Switzerland have created a 3D printed, biodegradable battery made from fungi, that needs to be fed rather than charged. At end-of-life, it digests itself from the inside
Sellotape dispensers made from 3D scanned rocks by ShinKogeisha
🎧 Listening
Andy Hunter, CEO of Bookshop.org, on Decoder discussing being the Amazon alternative, ending the ebook monopoly, and running a purpose-driven B Corp whose priority is mission not profit