The Environmental Citizen’s Playbook

• Quick look

  ✹ Project: Master’s thesis in Creative Sustainability, exploring the role of play and playfulness in environmentalist engagement.

  ✦ Role: Design research, co-design methods, facilitation, visual design, writing

• About the project

  My Master’s thesis in Creative Sustainability explored the place of playfulness and joy within sustainability dialogues.

  I wanted to explore where we can find and create little glimpses of hope, fun and playfulness in order to make sustainability engagement more personally sustainable.

• Research process

  The project is called “The Environmental Citizen’s Playbook”, and came from a place of personal eco-anxiety when continually engaging with sustainability issues at uni, work and home.

  Following a Situated Play Design, research-through-design approach (Altarriba Bertran et al., 2019), I designed cultural probes and autoethnographic tools to explore existing traces of joy and play within environmentally sustainable behaviour. These traces then became the basis for a series of collaborative workshops, exploring how to embed play and joy into our everyday interactions with environmental sustainability.

• Outcomes and impact

  The final outcomes are a co-created catalogue of ideas for finding joy in everyday environmental action, alongside a workshop pack centred around playful prompts. Everything is open source and available to download, contribute to and share at linktr.ee/ecoplaybook.

The project was included in the Parson New School’s 2023 Good Interventions exhibition. You can watch the video for the exhibition below:

You can also follow the digital legacy of the playbook on instagram @eco.playbook