Temporal Ecologies: Supporting wider awareness of, and engagement with, phenology using design and environmental humanities approaches

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This project will make innovative research contributions to both Environmental Humanities (EH) and Design, firstly by creating a new interdisciplinary bridge with an overlooked field. It will also speak to questions of tuning into temporal cycles that are obscured by dominant orientations to clock time, and explore how experiences of seasonality and climate change in Western societies can be articulated and experienced in localised ways. Insights will also be generated around designing with data for sustainability.The project will utilise the temporal design approach (Pschetz, Bastian, Speed 2016; Pschetz, Bastian 2018) and draw on methods such as design surveys, probes, games, data visualisation and others as fitting the student's interests and experiences. It will be further informed by the Design Informatics approach to designing with data and EH approaches such as critical plant studies and multispecies studies. The student will engage with EH research on ecological time, with interaction design approaches to public and volunteer engagement over the longer term, data sets available from the RBGE and WTNC, and their current strategies for working with recorders. As part of their research they may also gain practical experience in phenology recording.Key questions for the project include: How can design methods support renewed efforts to recruit and retain phenology recorders? How can design processes, objects or interventions use available phenological datasets and research to serve as wider prompts for understanding changing ecological timings? How might citizen scientists' experience of keeping long-term phenological records provide new angles on EH and Design research on supporting awareness of local environments?Working with the RBGE, WTNC and JNCC, we anticipate that these and related questions will be addressed through (a) a qualitative study of phenology recorders' values and practices, (b) engagement with phenology data to create engaging design interventions, (c) the co-development and iteration of a range of design prototypes to support wider participation, and (d) deployment and evaluation of prototypes in context. These are indicative methods. The successful applicant will be expected to tailor the methodology to their research questions and skillset.