Group Body of Work

Our space and scale project analytically examines “Who can afford to be sustainable? And at what cost?”. Following a meticulous dissection of UAL’s Net Zero Plan, we decided to focus our investigation on the current waste management strategy. The project explores the tension between the institution’s and the individual’s role in creating realised improvement within the waste sector. We aimed to constructively challenge the current infrastructure as laid out by UAL’s Net Zero Team, questioning the complex interplay between systemic institutional change and cooperation from the individual.

Zooming was utilised as a critical tool to examine our work as we transferred between different spaces and scales. The introduction of zooming enhanced our enquiry as it initiated a further dimension of temporality into our work, whilst prioritising interactivity and self-guided discovery for the audience.

Drawing inspiration from Italo Calvino’s (1972) Invisible Cities, speculative world-building became a lens to understand the future of UAL’s waste management. Through the practice of placemaking, we imagine how UAL could operate within the fictitious environments created: a speculative post-internet world, a speculative post-war world, a speculative world where landfill no longer exists, and, a speculative world where The Green Party is in power.

In an attempt to utilise graphic design to visualise scales of influence and impact, there was an ongoing impetus to communicate complexity. The fundamental understanding of the scale of the chain reaction cause by a singular decision within UAL’s waste management system underpins the entire body of work. The notion of a ripple effect guided the formation of the chapters, where each section builds upon the knowledge created in the previous. Following the same system of a network of dependencies, an index is created to categorise the project guided by the terms; context, contextual, contextualising, contextualisation.