David Buckley Borden, Harvard Bullard Fellow
Harvard Research Forest
Project: Hemlock Hospice; landscape ecology, art, and design
Role: Research, Design Consultation, Prototyping, Fabricating
In the Spring of 2017 I was asked by David Buckley Borden, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based interdisciplinary artist and designer, to come work as a design consultant and visiting artist in service of his Bullard Fellow at the Harvard Research Forest. There David was exploring the question, “How can art and design foster cultural cohesion around environmental issues and help inform ecology-minded decision making?”
Research, Prototyping, & Co-design
Over the course to two separate week long stints embedded at the research forest, I helped David tackle the question of how to engage the community with the goals of the research forest. Embracing an ambiguous space between art and science we began with the folks working on the ground.
Through interviews and collaborations with resident ecologists, research fellows and grounds staff, study of both the natural and man made interventions of the forest, and prototyping objects, we were able to unlock a specific story and make a broad challenge more tangible. We began to refine the year-long project into an art-based interpretive sculpture trail. Using scientific data, visual metaphor, and interaction we told the story of the ongoing demise of the eastern hemlock tree at the hands of a tiny aphid-like insect, the hemlock woolly adelgid from Asia. Focusing on this issue encapsulated the research and public interest goals of the 4,000 acre laboratory and classroom.
Speculative Design
In the process of moving towards the specific focus on the Hemlock, we created speculative objects built to extrapolate on ecological and environmental issues so as to imagine future scenarios and communicate some of the context of why the forest was collecting the amount of data that it does. Some themes included private ecological monitors in the face of less federal regulation, bricolage alternative energy technology, and an imaginative synthesis of nature and tech for organic data gathering.
