PART ONE
A statement that articulates how your group’s explorations helped you to reflect on, deepen, or shape your own position as a practitioner in context of climate justice and the UAL Net Zero plan (being as specific as possible).
The group project has been an equally reflective and expansive personal exercise in shaping my own position as a practitioner in the context of climate justice. Following the end of the group project, I have pursed an individual investigation to deepen the critical commentary with an impetus to reach a greater level of cohesion and conclusion within the body of work.
The exploration concerns itself with the critical question ‘Who can affordable to be sustainable? And at what cost?’. Through experimentation focused on world-building, the group iteratively developed speculative scenarios which reimagined UAL’s infrastructure for waste management in the future. The project sat at the intersection of architecture, place-making and communication design. The process has strengthened my own comprehension of the practical ways in which I can translate my architectural skillset into the field of communication design to promote social, political, or in this case, climate justice.
I currently work for Boehm Lynas, a small architectural practice rooted in environmentally conscious design. In my daily work, I regularly encounter the language used within the UAL Climate Action Plan, but exclusively within an architectural context. The group project has consolidated my understanding of the jargon surrounding climate justice, and expanded my application of the terminology outside the field of architecture.
Within my professional work, I have a nuanced appreciation of the social, political and climate implications of urban design. Environmental concerns guide all aspects my architectural work, yet I had not extensively considered how this ethos may apply to my practice within graphic design. This oversight is arguably due to the disparity in the tangibility of environmental impact within urban versus graphic design. The discipline of architecture is confined within the parameters of environmental policy, whereas graphic design requires self-initiated adherence to Net Zero Targets.
The project has been an act of contextualising in itself; not merely in terms of the representation of the UAL Net Zero data, but as a critical reflection on my position as practitioner. The work has expanded my perception of my responsibility as a designer, as I transition from an architectural context into a interdisciplinary practice.
PART TWO
An annotated bibliography consisting of 6 references that shaped your response to the brief, including:
2 texts from the reading list
2 texts that you find outside the reading list
2 design practices/projects.
Berners-Lee. M. (2022) The Carbon Footprint of Everything. London: Profile Books.
Although The Carbon Footprint of Everything (Berners-Lee, 2022) did not directly influence the outcomes of the group project, it was a vital text to develop our understanding of the wider theme of carbon emissions. Berners-Lee (2022) succinctly contextualises carbon emissions within everyday life, creating a robust foundational knowledge of the data. This reading was paramount to make the datasets more tangible. The text ensured my carbon literacy and enabled me to digest the statistics, and contextualise their qualitative size.
Bertolotti-Bailey S. (2015) Towards a Critical Faculty (Only an Attitude of Orientation). Liverpool: The Serving Library.
Stewart Bertolotti-Bailey’s (2015) Towards a Critical Faculty was an influential text within the Methods of Contextualising brief. The group wanted to effectively and critically challenge the role of UAL as an institution against the scale of the impact of decisions made by the individual. Our initial experimentation looked into the power structures and hierarchies within UAL, but without consideration on the relationship between the institution and the individual. This was not particularly successful as it disregarded the complexity of climate justice, and reduced the impacts into arbitrary categories.
Reflecting on Towards a Critical Faculty (Bertolotti-Bailey, 2015)encouraged a pivot in our thinking and refined our line of enquiry to more productively challenge the authority within UAL, whilst simultaneously retaining sensitivity towards the nuanced complexity of the subject. At this stage, we repositioned our project to create a critical line of enquiry that examined the role of the institution and the individual within the decisions made regarding waste management.
Calvino, I. (1972) Invisible Cities. Translated from the Italian by W. Weaver. London: Vantage Books.
Italo Calvino’s (1972) Invisible Cities was arguably the most useful academic reference in the development of our critical investigation into UAL’s waste management under the proposed Net Zero Plan. Similarly to Anna Tsing’s (2020) Feral Atlas, Invisible Cities (Calvino, 1972) is centred around world-building, in this case within a literary context. The notion of creating a complex network of fictitious cities helped establish a framework for our own line of enquiry. The introduction of creating speculative worlds encouraged our group to iterate quickly, imagining the impact of UAL’s waste management strategy through the multiple different lenses. This research relinquished our thinking from the initial reductive experiments, which utilised chess as a metaphor to examine the data, and further contextualised our investigation in the complex network of dependencies within climate justice.
Eames, C. and Eames. R. (1977) Powers of Ten and the Relative Size of Things in the Universe [Film]. Eames Office, Los Angeles.
Charles and Ray Eames (1977) astutely depict the relationship between scale and space through their film Powers of Ten. Throughout the group stage of the project, zooming was introduced as a critical tool to contextualise the scales of our world-building exercises. This was achieved through creating a folding publication, which zooms out in scale with each unfold. There was an motivation to put the micro scale of Central St Martins in conversation with the macro scale of the global impacts of UAL’s waste management.
The group exploration into zooming as a critical tool felt fairly rudimentary, therefore Powers of Ten (Eames, 1977) was revisited during my individual reflection of the project. Powers of Ten (Eames, 1977) was an important visual reference as it challenged the thinking around the medium in which the findings would be presented. The introduction of film unfixed the project from the staticity of the illustrations, and reframed the dialogue of the project into a space that could explore temporality, place-making and the scale of the social impact in one cohesive outcome.
Matos, A. (2022) Who can afford to be critical?: An Inquiry Into What We Can’t Do Alone, as Designers, and Into What We Might Be Able to Do Together, as People. Eindhoven: Set Margins’.
Phrasing our Methods of Contextualising exploration around a critical question allowed the work to be intentional and concise. Drawing inspiration from Who can afford to be critical? (Matos, 2022), we consolidated our initial research into the question of ‘Who can afford to be sustainable?’. The idea of affordability raises multiple different concerns that transcend above financial. We were collectively interested in the social and political repercussions of decisions.
The phrasing of our question was iteratively revised, to reflect the shift in our line of enquiry. We came to the critical question: ‘Who can afford to be sustainable? And at what cost?’. Afonso Matos’s (2022) Who can afford to be critical? was instrumental in the consolidation of our research, as the linguistic structure of the title of the book directly informed our method of approach to the group project.
The project concerns itself with the wider impacts of decisions made by both institution and individual within UAL, in an attempt to reveal, and challenge, the current systems of power and consequence.
Tsing, A. (2020) Feral Atlas. Available at: https://feralatlas.org/ (Accessed: 18 February 2026).
Feral Atlas (Tsing, 2020) successfully communicates the complexity of the ecological network, whilst maintaining the ease of the data consumption. The academic papers and statistics are hidden within a intricate index of ecologies, allowing the viewer to form their own journey through the platform as they access and interact with different data sets and information. Within the group project, there was an impetus to consider the viewer within the context of the work, and from the outset we imagined how the work could be meaningfully interacted with.
Feral Atlas (Tsing, 2020) acted as a key visual reference, due to the strong sense of world-building within the illustrative style. Within the graphics, space and scale are distorted, creating a speculative reality with a reordered hierarchy of ecologies. The themes of hierarchy, world-building and speculative realities remained central within our group exploration, as we critically investigated the role of the institution and the individual within a wider network of environmental and social consequences stemming from climate change.
Similarly to Ray and Charles Eames’ (1977) Powers of Ten, Feral Atlas (Tsing, 2020) utilises zooming as a method to contextualise space and scale. The viewer is invited to enlarge the illustrations to reveal further details about the ecologies. This method of contextualising was touched upon within our group project, and further examined within my individual restructuring of the body of work.
Reference List:
Berners-Lee. M. (2022) The Carbon Footprint of Everything. London: Profile Books.
Bertolotti-Bailey S. (2015) Towards a Critical Faculty (Only an Attitude of Orientation). Liverpool: The Serving Library.
Calvino, I. (1972) Invisible Cities. Translated from the Italian by W. Weaver. London: Vantage Books.
Eames, C. and Eames. R. (1977) Powers of Ten and the Relative Size of Things in the Universe [Film]. Eames Office, Los Angeles.
Matos, A. (2022) Who can afford to be critical?: An Inquiry Into What We Can’t Do Alone, as Designers, and Into What We Might Be Able to Do Together, as People. Eindhoven: Set Margins’.
Tsing, A. (2020) Feral Atlas. Available at: https://feralatlas.org/ (Accessed: 18 February 2026).
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