When news broke in February 2020 describing an unknown virus sweeping through Wuhan, China I remember the videos of eerily empty streets, pierced with the somber sound of singing residents on my social media feed. It was like a scene out of a film. It felt a million miles away from where I was in London. At the time it was impossible to imagine how quickly this invisible pathogen would race around the world, paralysing life as we knew it.
When a national lockdown was announced in the UK a month later, I spent the first couple of weeks in…
How philosophy and design can change our relationship to nature.
“Nature herself is sublimely eloquent. The stars as they sparkle in firmament fill us with delight and ecstasy, and yet they all move in orbit marked out with mathematical precision.”
Alexander Von Humboldt
There is a strange numbness that comes with acknowledging that we are not only entering the sixth mass extinction event in our planet’s four and half billion year history, but that our own species is solely responsible for the atmospheric and geological changes that are driving it (Kolbert, 2015). This realisation when fully acknowledged, prompts us to reflect profoundly on the role that humans play within the…
