The Environmental Citizen’s Playbook

Design ResearchRegenerative Design

Dec 31

Written By Savannah Vize

✹ Project: Master's thesis in Creative Sustainability exploring the role of play and playfulness in environmental engagement, later published as a DRS2026 conference paper

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

✦ Published: DRS2026 Proceedings, with Ferran Altarriba Bertran and İdil Gaziulusoy
My Master's thesis in Creative Sustainability explored the place of playfulness and joy within sustainability dialogues. I wanted to find out where we can find and create little glimpses of hope, fun and playfulness, so that engaging with sustainability becomes more personally sustainable.
This research has now been published as a conference paper in the Design Research Society's DRS2026 proceedings, presented in Edinburgh in June 2026. The environmental citizen's playbook: A catalogue of playful participation for environmental action was co-authored with Ferran Altarriba Bertran and İdil Gaziulusoy. Through a participatory research-through-design process, the paper identifies "play potentials", the relational spaces where playfulness naturally shows up in environmental action. It also presents a co-created catalogue of speculative interventions that imagine how these moments could be designed for. Together, they make the case for a more regenerative, joyful environmentalism, one that treats playfulness as a legitimate way to take part.
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.
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 research has since reached an academic audience too. It was published in the DRS2026 proceedings and presented at the Design Research Society conference in Edinburgh, where it helped make the case for playfulness as a legitimate way to engage with environmental action.