While design has begun to focus more on place-based, convivial knowledge, the current speed of environmental and global change calls for urgent new approaches that reconfigure our relationship with the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is a term proposed in 2016 to describe the new geological era and the current global situation where the influence of human activity on the environment is having long-term irreversible consequences (Anthropocene Advisory Group, 2016). This study asks how participatory design (PD) approaches can articulate engagement with the Anthropocene in an island-situated context. Articulation in this project describes the act of giving shape to and linking connections between people, places and actions (DiSalvo, 2012), creating an engagement space for designers and communities to operate in this era of the Anthropocene.
The research question was explored on the island of Papay (Papa Westray) in the
Orkney Islands, through a PD practitioner lens. To address the question the researcher
drew on fieldwork from an extended time spent living and researching on Papay,
presenting the outcomes in the form of a three-year single case study thesis,
accompanied by a digital fieldwork notebook and a portfolio exhibition of practice
reflecting on the Pap-ØY-cene – ØY meaning island in old Norse dialect. Through a
participatory action research – programme design research (PAR–PDR) methodology in
collaboration with the Papay Development Trust (PDT), British Science Association
(BSA) and Icelandic Glaciological Society (IGS), the research developed through a series
of island and Icelandic events and semi-structured interviews with islanders. Peripatetic
‘survival tools’ were developed to transition between three viewpoints – the remote
island environment, the island community and the global scale of the Anthropocene. The word peripatetic originates from the Greek word for walking around. It describes movement from place to place and was historically associated with nomadic monks, but is currently associated with teachers who move about the Orkney Islands from school to school. The researcher uses the term peripatetic survival tools to describe generative tools that help with moving with and adapting to changing conditions and engaging with issues of survival. Peripatetic tools in this project, such as the Papay Probe (a community-created and community-built set of tools to measure and compare island– glacial relations), helped to slow engagement and reflect upon this large-scale geological issue in a small-scale distributed remote island context and ‘produce an opportunity to raise a slightly different awareness of the problems’ (Stengers, 2005: 994).
This practice-based enquiry contributes to the field of PD with an engagement
framework that opens up boundaries between experts and non-experts and explores an
island-situated and action-based ‘public of concern’, engaging with the issues of climate
change. The aim in this research is for design practitioners to be able to use the insights,
methods and framework revealed in the single case study on Papay and develop tools
that tackle major moving issues such as climate change, enabling progress from where
this research stops.
