Within our funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) we have just over £750k, across three years of funding calls, to give to eligible institutions to explore how we might define, enact or explore Ecological Citizenship through innovative, short scale projects.
In our first year, (2024) we invited applicants to share their ideas around the theme of Materials and Resources and from the 92 applications we received, we are excited to be funding 7 brilliant projects in this first year of funding.
In our second year, (2025) we invited applicants to share their ideas around the theme of The Natural World and from the 86 applications we received, we are excited to be funding 15 amazing projects.
For our third and final round of funding, applicants were invited to submit their proposals aroud the them of Co-creating Everyday Ecosystems - from the 67 applications we received, we are thrilled to be funding 7 incredible projects. We will be announcing these projects in December 2025.
For more information, please see our Funding Page or get in touch with the team via email, ecological.citizens@rca.ac.uk.
Funding Round 3: Co-creating Everyday Ecosystems
Bristol Quiet Areas Plan: A Citizen-Led Approach to Co-Create an Inclusive Map with Neurodivergent People to Define Quiet Spaces and Improve Mobility.
University of Gloucestershire
University of Gloucestershire researchers have launched the Bristol Quiet Areas Plan, a pioneering project to identify and map the city’s most restorative urban spaces. Focusing on accessibility, sensory wellbeing and nature-rich environments, the project will explore how neurodivergent adults and wider communities experience quiet, cool and inclusive places across Bristol.
Working with Disability.Inc (WECIL), Visit West, Hush City and Tranquil City, the research team will use soundwalks, co-creation workshops and accessibility audits to understand what makes a public space feel restorative and comfortable for people sensitive to sound or sensory environments. Three pilot areas will be mapped using environmental data, lived experience and the Hush City App, identifying quiet green and blue spaces such as shaded parks, courtyards, riversides and tree-lined streets.
The project builds on the success of Bristol Soundwalks and will contribute new insights into how public spaces support wellbeing, mobility and climate resilience. Findings will directly inform local strategies on inclusion, accessibility, nature and health, supporting Bristol’s One City Plan and Climate and Ecological Emergency goals. A new Quiet Areas Map will be hosted on Visit West’s Accessibility Hub, helping residents and visitors discover calmer routes and restorative places across the city and creating a model for future mapping.
CARES: Citizen Action for Resilient and Ecological Sustainability.
Anglia Ruskin University
CARES investigates how creative, community-led design can strengthen everyday ecosystem resilience in climate-stressed urban environments. Working across Cambridge and the wider Fenland, the project collaborates with residents to uncover what they value most about their food systems, water resources, green spaces, and cultural heritage—and how these priorities can meaningfully guide urban justice and place-based climate adaptation. Through story circles, walking interviews, participatory mapping, and low-tech co-design, CARES enables citizens to articulate vulnerabilities, imagine alternative futures, and prototype micro-interventions rooted in care, equity, and belonging.
Central to the project is the CARE Platform (Community Atlas for Resilience and Ecology)—a co-created open-source digital atlas that brings together community stories, value maps, and adaptive strategies. Blending creative practice with accessible digital tools, the platform visualises relationships between local assets and climate risks, acting as a shared space for learning, planning, and intergenerational exchange. It functions as both a living archive and a practical resource before, during, and after climate events, supporting communities to coordinate resilient food, water, and heritage practices.
By integrating participatory methods, ecological citizenship, and inclusive civic technology, CARES offers a scalable framework for community-powered climate action—demonstrating how digital innovation, cultural memory, and collective imagination can nurture more resilient and caring cities.
Ecological Citizens’ Assembly: Rooted Deliberations with Everyday Ecosystems.
University of Sheffield
Ecological Citizens’ Assembly: Rooted Deliberations with Everyday Ecosystems, will explore how democratic innovations can be rooted both in place and in digital space. The initiative will stage two ecological citizens’ assemblies focused on food ecosystems – one at Regather Cooperative Farm, Sheffield, and the other within Regather’s digital twin, recreated inside a popular farming computer game, Farming Simulator.
In response to the South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority Citizens’ Assembly on Climate (2023) and its food systems recommendations, the project will examine how regional food policy recommendations for NetZero can be imagined in action in the context of local communities.
By bringing together a diverse group of ecological citizen-researchers, the project will experiment with how emerging digital deliberation tools and digitally simulated environments, alongside place-based citizen climate assemblies, can strengthen and reimagine ecological democratic governance.
Flow.Walk.Drag.Everyday: Pooling with Microbes, Water and Communities for Multispecies Care and Resistance.
Liverpool Hope University
Flow.Walk.Drag.Everyday transforms climate anxiety into collective action through radical play and multispecies solidarity. Building on our successful first phase, which saw audiences in Liverpool and Margate "catch the bug" through microbial drag performances, this project embeds ecological citizenship into daily life.
Our approach centers on "pooling" – inspired by how water naturally pools in tidal zones and how microbes share survival resources through horizontal gene transfer. We're creating networks of mutual aid between Liverpool and Margate, two waterside communities facing unprecedented sewage discharge rates and environmental injustice.
Through "Pooling Parties," embedded performances featuring Cholera and E.coli as knowledge carriers and everyday objects, we make environmental activism accessible, joyful and sustainable. This isn't about preaching; it's about co-creation. Working with partners including Granby 4 Streets CLT, People Dem Collective and other players, we're surfacing the invisible labour of ecological care while exploring how bacterial strategies like quorum sensing can teach us about organising for environmental justice. The project asks: How can dressing as bacteria help communities pool their capacity, share resistance strategies and find love in hopeless places?
Food Futuring: Co-creating a shared vision for Hertfordshire’s food system.
Loughborough University London
Food Futuring is a place-based collective visioning project that brings together stakeholders from across Hertfordshire’s food system to co-create a shared vision for increasing resilience and regeneration in the region. From farmers to food banks, councillors to community gardens, restaurants to residents – the diverse group will bring their unique perspectives to explore the question:
“How can collaborative action help to create a regional food system in Hertfordshire that serves the wellbeing of our communities and the health of our ecosystems, while building greater resilience to economic, societal and climate uncertainty?”
The project will pilot a hybrid approach to collective visioning that combines in-person participatory workshops with large-scale digital deliberation tools. This methodology seeks to broaden the scope of participation, integrating collective intelligence and consensus-building to better respond to the complexity of the deeply interconnected food system.
Imagined Infrastructures: Creative and Collective Worldbuilding to Explore Ecological Citizenship Within Specialist School Provision.
Queen Margaret University
This project uses innovative, trans-disciplinary approaches to work closely with young neurodivergent people to explore their experiences of ecological infrastructures within a specialist school setting. Over the course of the project we will be delivering creative workshops and gathering data that can help provide new insights on how to create more inclusive environments that can aid in the development of ecological citizenship.
Our aim is to co-develop a more resilient and inclusive environment that can provide more nuanced understandings of the different needs required by different groups of people. Our creative and collaborative project uses the concept of “world building” to imagine - and re-imagine - physical environments, social structures and cultures. Importantly, our project situates young people, staff and administrators equally together co-create and recreate a new version of their schools. These artistic and digital activities can be used to develop insights into how educational systems must change in the face of the climate emergency.
Nature-Centric Systemic Risk Tool for the Ecological Citizens of River Tone.
University of the West of England
River Tone faces increasingly severe interconnected risks – flooding, pollution, habitat loss, climate change. These risks don’t just affect people in the community, they also affect the animals, plants and fungi that also call this area home. Current approaches to addressing these issues are failing to create meaningful impact.
So, what if we tried a different approach and assessed these threats not just from our perspective, but from the view of our nonhuman animals, plants and fungi that call this place home? From the source on Exmoor to mouth at Burrowbridge - we’re hoping to bring together the “people of River Tone” to plan a new nature-centred systemic response to the risks River faces.
Between January and June 2026, we are holding a series of five half-day gatherings to explore the many interconnected risks River Tone faces, but with a twist - as we’ll do this all from a nonhuman perspective. By using the latest science and creative practice, we will immerse ourselves in the sensory worlds of Otter, Heron, Oak, Salmon and Crayfish (etc.), trying to think, move and act as they do. You will learn straightforward methods that help you sense the catchment differently, understand how risks travel across it, and imagine possible futures shaped by the needs of our nonhuman neighbours. Working alongside researchers and digital designers, we’ll build all this insight into an ambitious 3D digital platform the community can use to help guide decisions on how to act in support of our nonhuman cohabitants. By the end of these six months, with new friendships formed up and down River, and a new sense of closeness to the species we’ve worked so closely with, the “people of River Tone” will have a unique, first-of-its-kind digital platform to tackle the systemic risks we all face.
If you live anywhere within River Tone’s catchment, feel connected to the river in some way and are open to creatively working with River’s nonhuman animals, plants and fungi to explore risks, we would love to welcome you to join the project!
Funding Round 2: The Natural World
Augmented Nature: An augmented reality prototype for digital greening initiatives
Oxford Brookes University
This project explores how Augmented Reality (AR) can support communities in co-creating micro-scale nature-based solutions (Micro-NbS) within underutilised urban spaces. It will develop a user-friendly AR prototype that incorporates 3D digital models, allowing residents to visualise, design, and evaluate small-scale greening interventions. By simulating ecological impacts, the tool helps users understand how their actions contribute to climate resilience and sustainable urban living.
Through participatory workshops and real-world deployment, the project will integrate cognitive mapping with immersive AR to stimulate environmental learning, build digital capabilities, and promote ecological citizenship. The result will be a scalable, community-focused AR platform, adaptable to different urban contexts. By merging digital innovation, 3D visualisation, and sustainable design principles, the project offers a forward-looking approach to tackling environmental challenges through inclusive, tech-enabled green Transformation.
Beyond the Colony: Mapping emergence, art, and interspecies co-creation with social insects
Falmouth University
‘Beyond the Colony’ explores the intersection of art, science and social insects, aiming to reveal the emergent properties of insect colonies that are vital to human life while fostering creativity in shaping our shared ecological future. By co-creating art with insect societies, the project uncovers hidden narratives embedded in these hives, offering a new perspective on biodiversity, pollination, and ecosystem services. The project engages both the community audiences and researchers in participatory artworks that facilitate interspecies communication, exploring the role of insects like ants, bees, and wasps in human societies and their current challenges.
Our project will focus on developing artistic-scientific fieldwork strategies to include audiences, fostering the concept of 'citizen-artist-scientist,' and encouraging participants to reflect on insect creativity and collective intelligence.
Through a trans-disciplinary approach, the project integrates art and science to generate new insights, using both digital and analogue media for collaborative experimentation. This approach challenges traditional boundaries between art and science, creating innovative ways to engage with ecological issues and inspire action for a shared interspecies future.
Bringing People Back to the Farm: transitioning the farm to a regenerative community-centred ecological system
Loughborough University
This project explores how community-supported regenerative agriculture can address pressing challenges such as food insecurity, environmental degradation, and social disconnection from land and nature. Based at Grange Farm in Normanton on Soar, the research will engage local communities to understand what motivates people to volunteer regularly on organic farms—and what currently prevents them from doing so.
Through focus groups and surveys, the project will uncover community needs, interests, and barriers to participation. It will then co-design and pilot a new approach to mutually-beneficial farm volunteering, supported by digital tools. These tools aim to reduce logistical obstacles, increase accessibility, and build meaningful connections between people, place, and farm operations.
At its core, this project asks: how can we enable more people to engage with farms in a mutually beneficial way? It seeks to develop new social and technological arrangements that support long-term, community-led participation in regenerative agriculture.
CALMER: Coastal Anthropogenic Litter Monitoring with Ecological Citizen Researchers
Loughborough University
CALMER responds to two years of research working with communities on Scotland’s western coastline. Our previous / ongoing projects 50 Years of Litter on Skye, Siubhal a’ chladaich, and Aisle of Skye have developed our understanding of social and environmental contexts of marine litter through. This project will support further engagement with community partners to investigating how social and historical contexts of coastlines, and the creative practices that accompany them, can best inform contemporary environmental research. We will explore whether this can be augmented by digital technologies.
Reflecting on our collective experiences, CALMER will co-develop a toolkit with community groups that reflects on best practice for academics wishing to integrate communities into the design and delivery of environmental research projects. We will also co-develop a toolkit for community groups looking to start surveying beach litter on their coastlines.
Ecological Citizens in the Business School: working with nature in developing entrepreneurship practices
University of Birmingham
In the face of the climate emergency, there have been increasing calls for businesses to fully rethink their relationship with nature in the way they conceive/create their businesses and operate within the wider planetary ecosystems. Business schools sit at the forefront in preparing future organisational leaders, however, business education very often does not engage ‘with’ nature.
The objective of this interdisciplinary project is to investigate what ecological citizenship might look like in a business school setting. In a collaboration between Birmingham Business School, Winterbourne House and Garden and Jessica Adams, a nature based business strategist, the project will take business students outside of the classroom and will explore how they can learn about the environment by being in and with nature, reflecting on their relationship as human beings and what it means for their day-to-day entrepreneurial professional practices. For example, it will evaluate activities such as ‘sit spot’ exercises and intuition walks with the aim of establishing a pedagogical approach that offers insights and methods to business educators and identify ways for business students to embrace ecological citizenship within their professional lives.
Addressing Environmental Injustices through Transdisciplinary Science and Technology
University of York
How can the engineering of water monitoring devices support environmental justice for marginalised fishing communities? After the catastrophic die-back of crustaceans along the Yorkshire coast during 2021, it has become clear that there is an absence of systematic monitoring of water quality in this internationally important crab and lobster fishing ground.
For local fishers’, their experience of the die-back has reinforced a sense of injustice that had accumulated over decades in which policy and regulation has done little to support increasingly precarious livelihoods and has neglected local knowledge in the governance of marine environments. Our proposal is that water quality monitoring technology has the potential to drive environmental justice. However, we recognise that the use of data and devices in environmental monitoring routinely neglects local knowledge and reinforces power hierarchies, even when devices are deployed by local communities. This deepening of injustice arises from technological solutions that embed and materialise the norms, perspectives and bureaucratic priorities of authority. However, technology designed with marginalised groups has the potential to disrupt power relations and the persistent environmental injustices that they sustain. Our vision is for fishers’ knowledge and experience to be at the heart of a new environmental monitoring and decision-making framework for the Yorkshire coast.
Community-led nature-based solutions for protection against erosion and flooding in a low-lying island: Tiree, Scotland
The Open University
Our vision is to energise citizen-led protection and enhancement of natural coastal features in one of the UK’s most at-risk islands: Tiree. Tiree’s coastal machair ecosystem and marram grasses can stabilise sand dunes and reduce erosion.
However, this is dependent on healthy and vibrant coastal ecology, supported by traditional crofting practices and cooperation from residents and island visitors alike. It is also vital that traditional management practices and community efforts are technically and scientifically appropriate under a changing climate, and are guided by the best available knowledge for implementing nature-based approaches.
Our project will deploy small-scale natural interventions on Tiree that aim to reduce erosion and limit flooding. We will establish a digital platform to enable people in Tiree working in sectors from crofting to biodiversity conservation to arts to collate and evaluate evidence of ‘what works’ from different locations globally, and integrate this with local and traditional knowledge of Tiree’s coastal landscape. We will implement site-specific trials of four potentially viable approaches identified in existing practice or research: (a) marram planting in recycled creels; (b) sea defences involving used tyres; (c) dune stabilisation with used Christmas trees; and (d) a coordinated approach to clearing ditches on farmland.
Foraging Machines: Understanding and designing for digital eco-pedagogies
Cardiff University
Foraging Machines will capture a moment in how digital technologies like smartphones, portable tech, and wearables—powered by AI infrastructures and pervasive connectivity—are altering our lives and experiences of nature, and a sense of ecological citizenship developed through practices of foraging – both ‘in nature’ and digitally. Through pilot studies with amateur and commercial foragers in coastal and urban Wales, UK, the project will explore the new confluence of technologies that are shaping, and being reshaped by, countryside practices. This feasibility project will develop a new framework synthesising ethnomethodology, media geographies, and human-computer interaction to uncover how technologies influence human-nature relationships, co-creating new digital eco-pedagogies.
Through pilot fieldwork, developing a practitioner network, and holding an initial co-design workshop, it will pave the way for a wider study and intervention co-design for foraging, with wider implications for outdoor recreation and education, and connection to nature in the digital age.
FORESTED: Future-Oriented Regeneration of Ecological Spaces through Timber, Education and Design
London Metropolitan University
This project will enhance engagement with urban woodland using digital design and community fabrication of public furniture from hardwood trees in Lesnes Abbey Woods, London. The project will take place at a newly built woodland hub and engage established community volunteer groups in advocacy for the local ecology. Connecting woodland management, in-situ use of harvested timber, and amenity access to woodland, the project will create a template for ecological citizenship in other community woodlands.
Listen to Bristol
University of Bristol
What if residents from inner-city communities in Bristol recorded urban soundscapes, identified their natural neighbours through their sonic signatures and created unique musical compositions from the digital recordings? Would this encourage residents to see their neighbourhood through an ecological lens, recognise species interconnectedness and take collective action for environmental well-being?
These are some of the questions that interdisciplinary researchers from the University of Bristol alongside an award-winning music composer, an award-winning natural history sound recordist and the Natural History Consortium are exploring when they run a series of educational and research workshops with members of an inner-city community in Bristol during a feasibility study which will inform a larger city-wide community project called Listen to Bristol.
The co-developed feasibility study will invite residents of the Barton Hill neighbourhood to take part in two creative workshops – one that explores the notion of listening to and recording natural sounds found in the neighbourhood and one that uses the digital recordings to explore notation in nature to create community-led musical compositions. To what extent will these activities enhance the understanding of the non-human world and strengthen ecological awareness?
The researchers will also explore co-design and equitable community engagement that reflects diverse community needs and values.
Prototyping Multi-species Encounters: Relating to Redmires Reservoirs’ Residents
University of Sheffield
The UK's wild places face a polycrisis of ecological damage, biodiversity collapse and increasing human demand, impacting the species that reside in them. This project seeks to address this by employing speculative design research to foster positive human/non-human relationships in and around Redmires Reservoirs in Sheffield.
Through custom-designed research devices and workshops, the project will engage diverse publics to trial novel ways to encourage interspecies connections. Workshops led by researchers, in collaboration with Sheffield and Rotherham Wild Life Trust and local artists, will activate these devices, using drawing, making, and performance to gather data and foster engagement.
The research aims to: 1) improve site conditions for key species by engaging with the publics that visit them; 2) prototype positive interspecies encounters and relationships; and 3) advance debates in more-than-human co-design, entanglement theory and multispecies justice. The long-term aim of the work is to enhance public understanding of the challenges facing plants and animals on the site, contribute to improvements in species health, and bring academic research and understandings into a public forum through publications and events.
Nature at Night: Eliciting encounters of mutual care through a youth-led citizen science intervention
University of Chester
This study will produce a fully scoped design for a citizen science (cit-sci) intervention to engage young people in nature at night. Anthropogenic stressors increasingly impact nocturnal environments and wildlife, particularly species such as bats, which have recently seen an alarming fall in numbers within the UK. In different ways, bats, young people, and the nighttime are all tainted by similar cultural associations in the UK—troublesome or troubling, sinister, risky, fearful, and threatening.
This project encourages young people to develop an ethic of mutual care with the (nocturnal) natural world, simultaneously rehabilitating the individual reputations of bats, young people and the night. This initial feasibility study will use bat walks, fieldwork monitoring techniques, and digital technologies as the catalyst for developing a cit-sci intervention in collaboration with young people and external environmental stakeholders, ultimately enabling young people’s engagement, understanding and conservation of the (nocturnal) environment. Our focus on a maligned and misunderstood trio of agents (bats, youth, night) centres an under-represented group within ecological citizenship and raises awareness of the environmental challenges facing nature at night.
Reconnecting the Web of Life: Digitally integrating science and art to reimagine ecological citizenship
University of Oxford
How might digital design nurture a deep ecological connection that leads to meaningful change?
That’s the guiding question behind a new project from Oxford University’s Nature-based Solutions Initiative (NbSI), supported by the RCA’s Ecological Citizens fund. In partnership with a new nature-connection non-profit, I Stand Beside (ISB), the team is developing and testing an interactive species-matching platform that invites users to “stand beside” a chosen species.
Users receive personalised content, artistic prompts, and invitations to advocate for their species online and off-line for example by providing links to relevant local conservation projects, or connecting users with similar interests. The platform will be ecologically robust, creatively rich, and designed to empower sustained engagement. NbSI will provide scientific oversight, lead research, and assess impacts on nature connection and pro-environmental behaviours. ISB will ensure the platform’s long-term vitality, developing creative guides, advocacy and nature reconnection toolkits, and nurturing collaborations with artists and communities. A key feature is the piloting of ‘interspecies assemblies’—participatory gatherings where species are represented through storytelling, ritual, and roleplay. These events feed into the platform’s evolving ecosystem and offer a more embodied pathway into ecological citizenship. Together, these interventions aim to shift users from passive awareness to active kinship—designing for a future where biodiversity is protected not just through information, but also through relationship.
Left to right - Dr. Saana Isojunno, Dr. Emily Doolittle, University of Cumbria Conservation students Melissa McKenzie and Lucy Hall, Prof. Volker Deecke, and Dr Andrew Whitehouse. [Low: 2.11 KB. High: 121.78 KB.]
SCARF: Shetland Community Acoustic Research Forum
University of Cumbria
The Shetland Community Acoustic Research Forum (SCARF) is an ambitious collaboration of academics, marine industry groups, citizen scientists and artists to co-design a community-driven underwater sound monitoring programme in Shetland’s coastal waters.
Using small underwater acoustic recorders deployed on salmon cages, mussel farms and fishing creels, we will collect information on Shetland’s rich underwater acoustic ecology. This will complement ongoing marine conservation and management initiatives by helping understand seasonal variation in environmental sound (wind, wave and rain noise), occurrence of sound-producing animals such as killer whales and harbour porpoise, and how human activities (shipping and other industrial activity) feature in the underwater soundscape. SCARF actively involves marine industry workers in the collection of acoustic datasets and citizen scientists in their analysis. Interviews with those working in coastal waters will contribute valuable local knowledge about human relationships with marine ecosystems and perceptions of environmental change. Musical interpretation of underwater sound serves to create curiosity about marine soundscape ecology and engage community members with marine conservation. SCARF therefore presents a collaborative strategy to combine scientific data, local knowledge and artistic interpretation to support decision-making related to coastal conservation and promote ecological citizenship and engagement with marine ecosystems among Shetland’s communities.
Watershed Moments: Exploring ecological citizenship with the River Don
Sheffield Hallam University
Watershed Moments supports the River Dôn Project’s work to ‘give a voice’ to the River Don, which shapes the landscape and lives of 1.37 million citizens in South Yorkshire. By highlighting the ‘personhood’ of the river and the ‘rights of nature’, the River Dôn Project (RDP) aims to transform decision-making and generate new forms of connection between residents and the ecologies of the river. RDP has been working since 2022 to amplify and model the future rights of nature, and is now developing and deploying an innovative digital platform that supports new kinds of interactions with the river.
Using workshops, interviews and on-site observation, Watershed Moments will investigate how interacting with this platform supports new forms of ecological citizenship. It will investigate how digital technology can mediate and enable different ways of being a citizen. It will also support the RDP by informing a co-design process to refine the emerging digital platform, testing it against the complex connections we will uncover through original research.
Funding Round 1: Materials & Resources
Ag. Lab.: off-season farm production of building materials
University of Exeter
This project 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. We will investigate and test the potential to make best use of existing farm machinery and skills across all stages of the manufacturing system.
In response to an urgent need for alternatives to high-carbon materials and the destructive impacts of their extraction, the construction industry will increasingly look to agriculture to provide regenerative sources of plant-based building materials (Göswein et al 2022). Large scale, centralised, industrial production of these bio-based materials, connected to national and global supply chains, will be inevitable. However, to ensure resilience and lower collective emissions, this could be supplemented by a distributed, bioregional ‘Harvest to House’ approach offering more responsive, open systems of manufacture. There is an opportunity for smaller scale farmers to lead this change, by diversifying into growth & production of sustainable building materials for use on their own farms, or for construction in the local area, with great potential benefits to their own businesses, local economies, communities, and ecologies.
AI-Fixer: empowering ecological citizenship towards a sustainable digital society through AI-assisted consumer electronics repair
Royal College of Art
Ai-fixer aims to inform and assist national and global activities to address the e-waste problem by stimulating citizen-driven repair to support real change in industrial practices and user behaviour. We propose a framework for an AI-based tool that guides users through maintaining and repairing consumer electronics. This tool replaces traditional, underutilised repair manuals with an interactive, user-friendly interface, providing detailed assembly, disassembly, and repair instructions tailored to each product. This approach not only makes the repair process more accessible and manageable for users but also positions businesses as promoters of sustainability.
A key aspect of our vision is to scale up citizen-driven repair. AI-Fixer not only encourages individual action but also has the potential to influence collective behaviour, leading to a community-oriented approach to electronics sustainability. The project empowers communities by providing them with the tools and knowledge to carry out repairs independently. This empowerment fosters a sense of agency among users, making them active participants in environmental stewardship rather than passive consumers.
EcoLandS: a tool demonstrator for enabling new models of citizen-led ecological land stewardship
Loughborough University
The ecological crises we face are rooted in conceptions of property rights and individual ownership that are exemplified in the context of land governance, access and use issues, our most fundamental and finite natural resource. Acute pressure on land use, now and in the near term, is a crucial and contingent issue in addressing the climate and ecological crises globally. Building Net Zero housing, restoring biodiversity and rewilding, scaling up green energy infrastructure, and recalibrating our food production to regenerative approaches comprise key land use priorities. Whilst community-led land governance models may be desirable, processes that enable their exploration and development are limited and the UK lacks an integrated framework for strategic and democratic approaches to land use.
The EcoLandS project will develop a proof-of-concept digital service to enable communities to acquire dis-used land within their localities for ecological and biodiversity purposes, working in partnership with the Greater London Authority’s Nature Recovery Programme and the charity Thames 21. By creating a digital tool our goal is to build citizen knowledge of land ownership, access and use, to enable the conditions for communities to build democratic land stewardship models. This knowledge supports ecological citizenship by (re-)centering human-land relations, challenging undemocratic land management practices, and fostering public discourse around sustainable land use.
Flow. Walk. Drag.
Liverpool Hope University
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.
The project examines historical cholera outbreaks and current sewage pollution, inviting communities to connect hidden (hi)stories and new narratives inspired by water-based kinships. Working with local groups and organisations, the team will devise local tours led by performers in “microbial drag,” embodying water-dwelling microorganisms to provoke new perspectives on human-nature relationships.
Through community workshops, participants will co-create digital and printed maps, audio tours, and colourful memorabilia that highlight ecologically significant locations. These creative outputs aim to make the perspectives of non-human beings accessible, challenge extractive views of water, and generate jubilant methods for eco-care and social justice. By engaging underserved groups in both cities, the project fosters a sense of ecological allyship that transcends human/non-human divides. Flow. Walk. Drag ultimately seeks to inspire a more inclusive, joyful, and biodiverse understanding of ecological citizenship, rooted in local histories and contemporary environmental challenges.
Open Air: citizen science air quality monitoring
Glasgow School of Art
The core aim of this project is to engage and mobilise a community of people, in this case the trail running community in Scotland, to engage with ‘beyond activism’ and contribute to a prototype citizen science project to monitor air quality.
Air pollution is a public health issue in the UK, including for young people, those from disadvantaged backgrounds, and older people who are at higher risk. For real progress in improving air pollution-related public health, action is needed at multiple levels, from national policy changes to individual behavioural changes. Through this project, we will raise awareness of the quality of the air we breathe and promote ways to make individual and wider changes that support cleaner air.
Our project aim is to develop a citizen science project, using the trail running community as the focus, to collect and monitor air quality on trail running routes. We will design and produce open-source air monitoring equipment that can be used by runners to monitor air quality along running routes. Empowering them as a community to collect data, raise awareness in communities, and contribute to a national picture of our environment.
The ‘Wild House’: making connections between habitats for people and nature through an Ecology of Things [EoT]
University of Brighton
Regenerative Design approaches to material resourcing are often considered ‘niche’, at the ‘fringes of design culture’ and therefore not available to everyone. ‘Nature-first’ design and making methods can help support wild habitats but can also create built environments that are restorative for human users - therefore such approaches should be available to all citizens including users within the social housing sector.
Our project 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. The ‘Wild House’ will house co-design, prototype and user test products augmented with playful, sensorial technologies that ‘bring to life’ the relationships between every day, material things and the wider natural world from which they are derived. This interconnected network between people, products and the nature of place we are calling an ‘Ecology of Things’ (EoT). The ‘Wild House’ EoT is located within the UK’s ONLY urban Biosphere region and will give agency to everyday people to co-define regenerative futures that better connect people and wider nature.
Social Housing Retrofit: energy house types and citizen participation
Royal College of Art
Buildings account for 37% of global CO2 emissions. With 78% of UK homes built before 1980, nearly 60% currently have poor energy efficiency ratings. The project will explore how to enhance the reliability of data used in social housing retrofit planning by integrating physical, material, and behavioural analyses. Focusing on two London boroughs, the project will develop “retrofit archetypes” using machine learning and data from local councils.
By conducting a visual analysis of buildings in parallel to tenant interviews and workshops with housing stakeholders, the project compares retrofit measures to tenant needs and expectations, promoting better engagement to reduce the gap between predicted and actual energy savings. Expected outcomes include a methodology to improve retrofit planning and a report on data integration challenges. The project aims to improve retrofit strategies for social housing by ensuring effective, sustainable upgrades that meet both technical and occupant requirements.