Step Out and Look Wider
Consider your Action 3: when working with your chosen lexicon phrase what peripheral ideas/spaces did you touch on or think about. What is the broader field around your initial intervention? How is this important to you? How is it important to someone else? How is this important to a community? What’s the relationship between this and global-scale concerns?
Take these thoughts (or writing) with you and…
– Leave your home. (if you’re not in quarantine)
– Prioritize seeking things of nature. Seek out beings, found materials and phenomenon.
– Develop many-things inspired by the peripheral space / the field / the broader context.
Allow yourself to re-define the problem through new acts of making
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Prompting questions: (You are not obligated to answer these)
Consider how your neighbourhood contributes to your feelings/sense of home?
What does a change in context do to your thinking?
How does/can nature play a role in your designs?
Imagine if you’re living in the centre of a urban city, surrounding by skyscrapers, which is two-hours driving distance from the nearest natural park. How can you find some green near you?
The very first step is locate where you live in this city. For me,I pointed my house in this map (the orange dot);
NEXT, I decided to get downstairs and have a look at my surroundings, there must be some details I ignored.
After that, I start searching my neighbourhood to see the ‘nature’ around me. And I found there is a small market selling fruits and veggies just near my house (I’m surprised I didn’t know that, and one of my neighbours told me it just opened this week).
Walking into this market, there are the thing I’ve searching for. Those fruits and veggies are the gifts we get from the nature.
And back to the topic of action 3, ‘ecologically literate‘. Remember we only focus on a small piece under this huge one, which is: how to build a sustainable human society?
As an example, I bought an apple from the market, and we can treat this apple as the earth we’re living. They all has a spherical body with top surface, medium part and inner core, so in some point we can say they’re quite similar.
What if I peel this apple?
We can say this apple – without its skin is just like the earth being polluted. (Both losing the self-protection function) So, what can we do next?
Ideally, it would be great if we can get rid of daily pollution we made, and decreasing the unnecessary consumption for each people (it’s more like put the skin back onto this apple). But it’s very hard to achieve this in real life. So I just walk out and try to find some inspiration on what I can do next.
So I leaving my room and getting out.
And I go further, I can even see pandas.
It’s amazing to see all these within two hours drive from the city, and by visiting these places, I found that environmental protection is very important. If you want to maintain a sustainable community, the initial step is to reduce waste in the community. So I’ve narrowed my topic: waste disposal in the community.