This paper explores the role and potential for design as process, artefact and experience to help frame and address societal problems. We consider this through examining a future folklore dialogical object, designed to stimulate conversation and question assumptions. Beekeeping is a particularly rich context with which to adopt this methodological approach, given the significance of global threats to insect pollination aligned with beekeeping's extensive cultural heritage. By drawing on past narratives and contemporary knowledge and practices, the Beespoon, a small copper spoon representing the amount of honey a single bee can make, was codesigned as an experience that actively engaged people with concepts of work, value and pollination. Our design process oscillated across past, present and future stories-the Beespoon as future folklore artefact and experience reflects this complexity, operating across time and value systems to provide new ways to think about how we perceive and understand bees.
What is the significance of a human life in relation to the timespan of the geological processes that shape and reshape the terrain under our feet? Here, we ask how we might think on a planetary scale while being grounded in the everyday, tracing the relationship between biographical time and geological formation. Examining social relationships through the materiality of sandstone, uranium, and concrete, this paper presents a collaborative deep time practice, realised through the iterative process of walking, reading and inscribing a specific site, the West Shore of Stromness, Orkney.
The honey bee is a powerful cultural motif that remains an important symbol for the future. Their role as pollinators, alongside a myriad of other species, is critical to the continued diets of humankind. This Future Scenario explores a possible near future where human intervention poses new risks to their survival. Drawing on folklore and contemporary beekeeping practices, Mr ShoreÕs Downfall tells a tale of discovery and loss as a young beekeeper is introduced to the world of honey bees. Three imagined artefacts are revealed through the story and discussed with consideration of their cultural context, desirability and relation to socioeconomic factors. Themes from Mr ShoreÕs Downfall are examined, and the potential of writing practice for design fiction practitioners is considered.
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