PROJECTS

Earth Logic Design
Forest Meetings
Earth Logic
UCRF
BOOST Metadesign 
TLLAA
Design + Change
Metadesign project
Lifetimes
Lucky People Forecast
Urban Nomad

EARTH LOGIC DESIGN

What does it practically mean to work in an earth logic way?
Which new professional roles are needed to create healthy and safe lives within Earth’s limits?

In the project Earth Logic Design, we are rehearsing new designer roles that create values beyond economic growth. (Earth Logic = what makes sense for the happiness and health of planet and people). Imagine, for example, a language ombudsperson who helps organisations to use words and imagery that open up new ways of understanding, and that ease connection with both different disciplines and different species. Or, a matching agent who is so attentive to needs and resources in the local area, that they can match surplus time, energy, furniture, skills, community with a lack thereof.




To learn about the potential of an earth logic lens, we are collaborating with individuals and organisations that we think work in an earth logic way, a youth theatre group, a museum of storytelling, as well as people working close to life and death. We do this in the specific place of Ljungby, Sweden, so that we can learn how change agents are rooted in place and form networks. We are collaborating with designers working as change agents globally to find out what friction they meet, which tactics they have evolved and how their work can be supported with education, infrastructure, regulation.

An important contribution we want to make with this project is a way to evaluate and communicate values of earth logic design. We will also develop guidelines for how, for example, municipalities and universities can support change agents. 



Mathilda Tham leads this project, working with Åsa Ståhl and Maja Frögård, the Department of Design, Linnaeus University. Earth Logic Design is an ongoing research project (2023–2025) within the larger project InKuis which explores innovative cultural entrepreneurship through collaboration and is funded by the Kamprad Foundation.

FOREST MEETINGS



The Forest is a topic that provokes strong emotions and sometimes conflict. On the forest is placed expectations to meet many needs: to sink carbon, to provide habitats for biodiversity, to replace fossil based building materials, textiles, and fuel, and to provide livelihoods, recreation and more. The forest therefore touches many disciplines and sectors and virtually concerns us all.

The idea behind Forest Meetings was to create a safe, brave, open, knowledge-based and generative meeting place where people of all sectors and disciplines could share perspectives and learn together in relation to the forest. 

We created a digital meeting format, bringing together scientific and artistic approaches to create an experience of being in the forest to talk about the forest and imagine new ways to be with the forest that respects Earth’s limits. The meetings followed four themes, focusing on conditions for deep collaborations, futures oriented indicators to guide engagement with the forest, myths and facts - and everything in between, and reimagining innovation in relation to the forest. 

The Forest Meetings also generated a series of Forest Field Visits, a digital resource and exhibition containing short videos from lay persons who like to be in the forest as well as forest workers and scientists sharing knowledge and experiences. I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to learn  about forests and especially thinking about the long time horizons of decision making in and about forestry. 

Mathilda Tham led the project Forest Meetings, working with Miranda Moss, Juliana Restrepo-Giraldo, Åsa Ståhl,  Jorge Zapico, Linnaeus University. The project took place during 2021–2022 and was hosted by Linneaus Knowledge Environment Green Sustainable Development. The visuals were created by Nasra Rashiid.

EARTH LOGIC: FASHION ACTION RESEARCH PLAN


The Earth Logic: Fashion Action Research Plan came out of the realization that decades of attempts to make fashion more environmentally and socially sustainable have failed because the underlying logic of the fashion sector is to create economic growth. This logic results in exploitation of people and other species to achieve constantly shorter lead times, lower prices and higher volumes. Because of this logic, benefits of initiatives directed at fashion products - such as replacing conventional with organic cotton, or directed at discrete systems – such as take back and recycling schemes, are eaten up by fast and vastly growing volumes of fashion products. 

With this insight, Kate Fletcher and Mathilda Tham decided to go upstream and instead of new technologies, products, or even systems, propose a new logic for the fashion sector. We have called this Earth Logic, what makes sense – or is logical – for the health and survival or earth and all its species, including humans.  




Since we launched Earth Logic at London Fashion week in February 2020, it has reached over a million people through global media articles, and we have had dialogue with over 3500 fashion stakeholders from industry, research, education, governance, NGOs, activism as well as with communities. Earth Logic has inspired new initiatives in media, industry and education and was the key reference point for a policy briefing by the European Environment Bureau.

Recent and current Earth Logic projectS focus on gardening as a metaphor for systems change, local governance, learning as a driver for change, new professional roles. There are many resources available on the Earth Logic website.

Earth Logic was first introduced in the publication, the Earth Logic Fashion Action Research Plan commissioned by the JJ Charitable Trust in 2019 as a radical, advanced and comprehensive framework for sustainability research for fashion. Kate Fletcher and Mathilda Tham are long-term collaborators of systems change in fashion, with work including The Lifetime Project, Routledge Handbook of Fashion and Sustainability, and Union of Concerned Researchers in Fashion. 

UNION OF CONCERNED RESEARCHERS IN FASHION 

The UCRF started with a radical manifesto for systems change in the fashion sector to overcome empty promises, greenwashing, unnecessary duplication of research and procrastination of change because of an over reliance on technology. Inspired by the Union of Concerned Scientists we wanted to make a home for all of us globally working for radical change in the fashion sector, to learn together, to support each other and to make our actions and voices stronger. 




The UCRF organises local assemblies, drives actions around, for example, policy and has a series of working groups. We have a code of conduct, centred around change, courage and collaboration that sets the tone for each meeting and which guards the integrity of our work. The UCRF creates an unusual fashion scene as it brings together perspectives from different parts of the fashion sectors around the globe.

The Union of Concerned Researchers of Fashion was founded by Kate Fletcher, Lynda Grose, Timo Rissanen and Mathilda Tham in 2019. Now we are thirteen members of the board, reflecting the diversity of our members from 43 countries across the continents.

BOOST METADESIGN – HOUSING WITHIN EARTH’S LIMITS


The project Boost Metadesign explored two converging housing crises. 1. The lack of affordable and suitable housing for students, migrants and older persons – groups unprioritized by the market. 2. The threat to our home Earth, as human activities are driving detrimental changes to vital Earth systems, threatening all life on this planet. 

The project took place in the region of Småland, Southern Sweden, spanning rural and urban areas as well as what is in between. We worked in co-creation with students, migrants, older persons, local and regional governance, and the building sector. We developed new scenarios for housing – The matching agency – matching surplus with needs, House-human-choreography – flexible, agile and emergent housing responding to needs, Trans-port – housing as interdependent with mobility and mobility as learning, and Oikology – home ecologics a new learning field for life within Earth’s limits. The project also generated a series of methods for co-creation – scenario salad anyone? and a series of cruxes (itchy dilemmas) that can be bounced into housing planning processes – whether by citizens, industry or a municipality or region. We shared the project in a hybrid format of a touring performance-lecture-exhibition.



A concrete outcome of the project is the book Oikology – Home Ecologics: a book about building and home making for permaculture and for making our home together on Earth. In line with the project’s ethos of co-creation, the book includes ‘recipe’s for home making from many of the project participants. 

Mathilda Tham led the three-year-long (2017–2019) project Boost metadesign, working with Åsa Ståhl and Sara Hyltén-Cavallius, the Department of Design, Linnaeus University. It was part of a larger project, BOOST, which also included development of hands on technical prototypes of wood and glass and business model innovation, and was funded by the European Regional Development Fund.

TRANSNATIONAL LIVING LAB FOR ACTIVE AGEING (TLLAA)
This project responded to the context of a rapidly ageing society, declining resources for care and many people living away from their relatives and close friends. An ageing society presents many challenges including the risk of loneliness, mental ill-health in older persons and ageism. As we shared insights across Sweden and Japan, we learnt that meaningful occupation and authentic participation in community are central aspects of living well, including in old age. The core proposal of the project – complementing many technology focused initiatives – was therefore to strengthen the connections between different generations in society. Using living lab methodology we worked with different stakeholders – local and regional governance, health care, education, companies, and local communities in Växjö, Sweden and Kawamura, Japan to co-create and prototype proposals, including:  

’The  TRALALA Choir’ (playing with the project acronym) is open to all ages, live and digitally for accessibility, as singing can accelerate a sense of community and bring back memories as well as skills. This led to the development of ‘Care-oke – a singing orchestra of care’ – a methodology for using singing in transdisciplinary collaborations.

’The Intergenerational Start-up’ brings together insights and ideas from the very young and old and all in between. It breaks the norm of the typical entrepreneur, can add important diversity to the innovation process, and can balance resources such as time, energy, experience, patience which can differ across an individual’s lifespan. 

The notion of ’Age Creativity’ can be used to discuss and raise awareness of norms and presumptions associated with age, and how they can limit what individuals and society allow people of different ages to be and do.




Transnational Living Lab (2017–2019) was a collaboration between researchers from design and social work, Linnaeus University and from gerontology, Tokyo University. Mathilda Tham led the Swedish part of the project, working with Sara Hyltén-Cavallius and Angelika Thelin. The project was funded by Vinnova and Japan Agency of Science and Technology. 

DESIGN + CHANGE



How can we design design education to maximise designers and design’s potential to make change? This was the guiding principle behind the programmes BFA Design + Change, BFA Visual Communication + Change, and MFA Design + Change, at the Department of Design, Linnaeus University. 

They are based on understandings from metadesign, for example by emphasising the interplay between the designed products, the systems they form part of, and the cultures and mindsets that shape thought and action spaces.

Therefore, we opened up the focus from the typical specified outcome (such as furniture, fashion, products or advertising) of design education. Instead, on the + Change programmes, the type of designs that students develop depend on the needs and opportunities in the context they address. This means students may design a new ritual for sharing, a guide for collaboration, a tool for engaging citizens in biodiversity. The systemic take on sustainability means that students address many themes: mental health, climate change, pollution, poverty, war, crime, migration, integration, and often in combinations. To support as diverse conversations as possible, the programmes have international intake also for bachelor students, and the staff is equally diverse. We say that we speak ‘Smålish’, the English of Småland, which is imperfect and thrives on mistakes. To support learning from a specific place and community, we dedicate a whole term to the local region of Småland, because if you have learnt to design from one specific place, you can also do it in other places. 

The programmes build competencies in two core areas of Design and Change (theories, sciences, histories of sustainability and change), and three support areas of Communication for impact, Learning and curiosity, and Collaboration, community and care.

Mathilda Tham brought the guiding metadesign frameworks into the work of designing the new degree programmes and have continuously worked with staff and students to shape them. The new + Change profile was launched in 2015. Learn more about our programmes here and recent student work here.

BENCHMARKING SYNERGY LEVELS WITHIN METADESIGN
Meta means ‘overarching’ and ‘change’. Metadesign means the design of design itself and design of change. 

A key understanding guiding this project was that current challenges – climate change, biodiversity loss, social inequality, war, pandemics, mental ill-health – are too complex for individuals or organisation in isolation to grasp, let alone solve. Therefore the project focused on developing principles and upwards 100 tools for synergistic collaboration between many different disciplines, sectors, cultures and interests. An example of the tools we designed, now used internationally in many iterations is Five levels of story-telling which takes people from individual experiences and stakes to shared understanding and new visions in just half an hour. Another key understanding was that current challenges cannot be met with a narrow scope of knowledge. Therefore, we worked with four action styles,  representing different ways of working: Languaging, New Knowing, Envisioning and Pushing and Doing. Core to our project was the connection between the individual ‘ME’, the collective ‘WE’, and the larger WORLD, and the essential loop back to ME, reflecting ideas of connected inner and outer change featuring in, for example, the Transition movement, the Permaculture movement, the Inner Development Goals and Engaged Buddhism.

Being part of the project was an amazing opportunity to engage with the deepest purpose and potential of design and to learn with a very exciting team and international network. The frameworks and processes we developed have travelled into many different contexts globally.

The metadesign project was a research collaboration between  John Wood (project leader), John Backwell,  Batel Dinur, Hannah Jones, Julia Lockheart, Anette Lundebye and Mathilda Tham. It was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK. See the project website for a range of resources.

For an introduction to metadesign see Giaccardi, Eliza. 2005. “Metadesign as An Emergent Design Culture”, in Leonardo, Volume 38, Number 4, August 2005.

LIFETIMES – SCENARIOS FROM SLOW TO FAST FASHION
The aim of the Lifetimes project was to diversify strategies for sustainability in fashion – to match the diversity of why and how people use fashion. The project responded to the limitations of the dominant ‘blanket’ approaches, for example to propose durability of garments even if in reality they may be worn for a very short time, and may not be affordable to many wearers. Such materially focused strategies miss that fashion isn’t primarily worn for material reasons (to protect from the cold, sun, wind) but to express identity and belonging specific to a time and place. 

Our research therefore cross-referenced users’ actual experience with acquiring, wearing, caring for and disposing of fashion items with available lifecycle data. Our insights included that it is not the people who are the most interested in fashion who have the most impact on the environment; they are creative and confident and can reconfigure old garments and materials to make new fashion. Instead it is the people who feel they have to follow fashion and lack confidence who effect the environment the most, because their fashion expression is dependent on a fast stream of new items. An outcome of the project was scenarios on a spectrum from slow to fast fashion, designed to generate discussion and inform strategies in the fashion sector. At the slowest end is the coat that passes from one generation to the next, enabled by equally durable materials inside and out, accessible mending services and upskilling. At the fastest end is the one night wonder top made from low quality waste materials and compostable. With this project, we introduced the notion of product-service-systems to fashion, and it was a precursor to attempts to introduce different models of providing fashion, such as leasing and lending. 



With this project, we took a wider look at fashion and sustainability and directed our attention to the level of systems. Many of the proposals we developed are still visionary and valuable within an overall scaled down fashion sector. In hindsight, we know that attempts at both product and discrete systems levels have been unsuccessful in delivering both environmental and social improvement because of the exponential growth of the sector: more than doubling since our work in 2004. Therefore, in 2019, we developed the Earth Logic project.

The Lifetimes project (2003–2004) was a collaboration between Kate Fletcher and Mathilda Tham, hosted by Goldsmiths, University of London, and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

LUCKY PEOPLE FORECAST
 In the late 1990s I experienced a crisis when I realised that my passion for fashion was not compatible with my growing awareness of the effects on people and the planet that fashion has. This led me to do first a master in Design Futures and then a PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London. Lucky People Forecast is the proposal to reposition fashion designers, as well as other fashion stakeholders, as agentic and powerful futures makers who can through their unique skills, interests and networks make a fashion system that contributes to social justice and a healthy planet. I worked in co-creation with many fashion stakeholders – from big and small companies, media, trade organisations, fashion education as well as citizens in Sweden and the UK to develop the Lucky People Forecast approach. It is a methodology for working with systemic change through a combination of design, futures studies and systems thinking.  

In the project I articulated a kind of manifesto which has guided my work since:

– Forecasting – telling stories about the future – is a super powerful tool. Stories about our world – whether encapsulated in a garment, a campaign or a service, are much likelier to shape the future and become the future, than stories that have not been told or that no-one hears.

– Designers are ‘lucky’ in the sense that we can shape the future through the things, systems, stories that we design. Because of the power of the forecast, and because the stories that design tells can reach wide and far, designers also have a big responsibility to make stories that are good for the planet, all species and people, now and in the future. 

– By inviting different people and diverse perspectives – also those of other species and other time frames – into co-creation, we can create stories that don’t just reproduce a privileged past and present. 

– Bringing together many ways of knowing and expression, and combining art and science, makes co-creation and forecasting accessible, agentic (feeling that you can do something) and fun for many people.




Lucky People Forecast – a systemic futures perspective on fashion and sustainability, my PhD project from Goldsmiths, University of London, was completed in 2008. You can download the whole thing here.