Ecological Citizen(s) Network+ announces recipients of first round of funding in research project enabling communities to catalyse sustainable change

Ecological Citizens: Tools, Technologies and Means to Enable Sustainable Citizens brings together a multidisciplinary team of experts in design, science and technology to tackle the ecological and climate crisis by using the digital economy to catalyse sustainable change beyond individual actions. Its mission is to foster and proactively encourage (through technologically appropriate interventions) Ecological Citizenship for positive climate action.

The project was awarded £3.3 million in 2023 by UKRI’S Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to establish the Ecological Citizen(s) Network+, over 4 years.

The grant awarded by EPSRC includes three rounds of funding which will support innovative projects, initiatives and pilots devising new-found ways to encourage and explore Ecological Citizenship and its potential in moving us towards preferable futures.

In this first round, under the theme Materials and Resources, following an extensive review process the projects awarded funding are:

1. AI-Fixer: Empowering Ecological Citizenship towards a sustainable digital society through AI-assisted consumer electronics repair [Royal College of Art]
   1. AI-Fixer aims to inform and assist national and global activities to address the e-waste problem by scaling up citizen-driven repair and supporting real change in industrial practices and user behaviour.
2. Social Housing Retrofit: energy house types and citizen participation [Royal College of Art]
   1. Social Housing Retrofit aims to promote better engagement to reduce the gap between predicted and actual energy savings, comparing retrofit measures to tenant needs and expectations. The project will develop “retrofit archetypes” using machine learning and data from local councils, alongside a visual analysis of buildings in parallel to tenant interviews and workshops with housing stakeholders.
3. Open Air [Glasgow School of Art]
   1. Open Air aims to engage and mobilise people to engage with ‘beyond activism’ and contribute to a prototype citizen science project to monitor air quality. Working with the trail running community in Glasgow Open Air will use open source air monitoring equipment to collect data, raise awareness in communities, and contribute to a national picture of our environment.
4. Flow. Walk. Drag. Microbial life invites a citizenship perspective on the past, present and future of “open-source” in Liverpool and Margate. [Liverpool Hope University]
   1. Flow. Walk. Drag is a participatory art-science collaboration with water as the source of life and activism in Liverpool and Margate. This joyful and queer exploration uses drag performance, interactive maps and walking tours to reimagine ecological citizenship through a lens of biodiversity and playful species-crossing.
5. The ‘Wild House’ – making connections between habitats for people and nature through an Ecology of Things [EoT] [University of Brighton]
   1. The ‘Wild House’ will create a pioneering ‘regenerative retrofit’ and ‘show home’ social house fitted out with innovative objects and ecological experiences that connect inhabitants to the myriad other species dwelling in the landscape from where its’ materials are sourced.
6. EcoLandS: A Tool Demonstrator for Enabling New Models of Citizen-led Ecological Land Stewardship [Loughborough University]
   1. EcoLandS will develop a proof-of-concept digital service to enable communities to acquire dis-used land within their localities for ecological and biodiversity purposes. Its aim is to build citizen knowledge of land ownership, access and use, and to enable the conditions for communities to build democratic land stewardship models.
7. Ag.Lab: Off-Season Farm Production of Building Materials [University of Exeter]
   1. Ag.Lab will develop and deliver a small-scale trial of a site-specific system of manufacture that will enable arable farm workers to make low carbon, plant-based, insulating blocks out of season, for use in local construction. The project will explore the human, environmental, and infrastructural barriers and opportunities for production through collaborative dialogue with farmers and farm workers.

Ecological Citizen(s) Network+ is led by Dr Rob Phillips (Senior Tutor in MA Design Products / MDes Design Futures, School of Design, RCA) with Professor Sharon Baurley (Director of the RCA’s Materials Science Research Centre) and Tom Simmons (Head of Programme, MA Digital Direction, School of Communication, RCA), in partnership with Dr Sarah West, Director of the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) at the University of York and Professor Alec Shepley of the Faculty of Arts, Computing and Engineering at Wrexham University, as well as a range of non-academic partners from industry, charities, culture and civil society.

Ecological Citizen(s) Network+ follows a number of initiatives at the RCA that have employed design innovation, technology and collaboration to promote awareness of, and increase access to, sustainable processes and products. These initiatives include; The My Naturewatch project, in collaboration with Northumbria Interaction Research Studio, the BBC and The Wildlife Trusts’ #30dayswild programme; the Terra Carta Design Lab – which invites students and alumni to design solutions addressing the climate crisis – as well as work carried out by the College’s Textiles Circularity Centre.

Conceptually, the notion of ‘Ecological Citizenship’ was published in a seminal position paper at the prestigious Cumulus Detroit conference in November 2022. This design-led work believes:

EC is defined as “activities that go beyond your own agenda, benefiting the wider ecologies, systems or communities surrounding you” (Phillips, et al., 2022).

As an ever growing research network, Ecological Citizen(s) mobilises diverse groups of people to make impactful change through accessible technology and community-focused approaches – including citizen science, activism, collective learning, advocacy, design strategies, creative arts, manufacturing, environmental science and engineering practices. As a pro-active collaborative community, the network has the potential to cover a wide range of pressing topics from biomaterials and wildlife corridors to local manufacturing and repair, and will draw on expertise from across the RCA, as well as other academic, business and civil society partners.

Ecological Citizen(s) Network+ is a NetworkPlus project funded by EPSRC grant EP/W020610/1 that is focused on digital interventions that would create ‘the conditions to make change’ towards a sustainable post-industrial society.