Bringing home recursions : co-crafting environmental self-implication in adult design education

Abstract

This report is about an explorative co-crafting course applying the notion of recursive publics to adult learning and pro-environmental activation, which aimed to engage a diverse cohort of learners towards patterns of eating, living, and engaging that promoted wellbeing and a healthy environment. This two-month-long, university-endorsed study in Hong Kong saw 22 participants fermenting their urine in which to grow an edible plant (Lactuca sativa), thereby creating a material relationship between their bodies and the environment. Technologies were employed to bring people physically together for greater emancipatory engagement inside the shared material condition. When analyzed, these technologies revealed their potential for opening or restricting the synergies from combined purpose, expertise, and immanent life processes in recursively profound and playful ways. This civic-tech study offers a recursive self-implication approach to design education as a collective negotiation process for navigating unknown territory to converge a myriad of expertise and intended beneficiaries.