Ecological Citizen(s) Network+ announces recipients of its second round of funding, in a research project empowering communities to use digital tools for sustainable change

Ecological Citizens: Tools, Technologies and Means to Enable Sustainable Citizens brings together a multidisciplinary team of experts in design, arts, science and technology to tackle the ecological and climate crisis by using the digital economy to catalyse sustainable change beyond individual actions. Its mission is to foster and proactively encourage (through technologically appropriate interventions) Ecological Citizenship for positive climate action.

The project was awarded £3.4 million in 2023 by UKRI’S Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to establish the Ecological Citizen(s) Network+, over 4 years.

The grant awarded by EPSRC includes three rounds of funding which will support innovative research projects, initiatives and pilots devising new-found ways to encourage and explore Ecological Citizenship and its potential in moving us towards preferable futures. In this second round, under the theme The Natural World, following an extensive review process the projects awarded funding are:

1. Augmented Nature: An augmented reality prototype for digital greening initiatives [Oxford Brookes University]
   1. Augmented Nature will develop a user-friendly AR (Augmented Reality) 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. 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.
2. Beyond the Colony: Mapping emergence, art, and interspecies co-creation with social insects [Falmouth University]
   1. ‘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. The project will engage both 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. Through a trans-disciplinary approach, the project will integrate art and science to generate new insights, using both digital and analogue media for collaborative experimentation, and encouraging participants to reflect on insect creativity and collective intelligence.
3. Bringing People Back to the Farm: transitioning the farm to a regenerative community-centred ecological system [Loughborough University]
   1. 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 co-design and pilot a new approach to mutually-beneficial farm volunteering, supported by digital tools.
4. CALMER: Coastal Anthropogenic Litter Monitoring with Ecological Citizen Researchers. [Loughborough University]
   1. CALMER responds to two years of research working with communities on Scotland’s western coastline. This project will support further engagement with community partners to investigate how social and historical contexts of coastlines, and the creative practices that accompany them, can best inform contemporary environmental research, and whether this can be augmented by digital technologies. 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, alongside a toolkit for community groups looking to start surveying beach litter on their coastlines.
5. Ecological Citizens in the Business School: working with nature in developing entrepreneurship practices [University of Birmingham]
   1. 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 establish a pedagogical approach that offers insights and methods to business educators and identifies ways for students to embrace Ecological Citizenship in their professional lives.
6. Addressing Environmental Injustices through Transdisciplinary Science and Technology [University of York]
   1. 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 became clear that there was an absence of systematic water quality monitoring in this internationally important crab and lobster fishing ground. 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, co-producing technology and data that embody fishers’ knowledge and experience and can be used by fishery and marine management authorities. This will demonstrate the efficacy of community-led design, monitoring and data processing to fishers and decision makers locally and nationally.
7. Community-led nature-based solutions for protection against erosion and flooding in a low-lying island: Tiree, Scotland [The Open University]
   1. 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. This project will deploy small-scale natural interventions on Tiree that aim to reduce erosion and limit flooding, establishing 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.
8. Foraging Machines: Understanding and designing for digital eco-pedagogies [Cardiff University]
   1. Digital technologies are altering our lives and experiences of nature. Foraging Machines will explore the new confluence of technologies that are shaping, and being reshaped by, countryside practices. It will seek to co-create new digital eco-pedagogies, paving 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.
9. FORESTED: Future-Oriented Regeneration of Ecological Spaces through Timber, Education and Design [London Metropolitan University]
   1. 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.
10. Listen to Bristol [University of Bristol]
    1. 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.
11. Prototyping Multi-species Encounters: Relating to Redmires Reservoirs’ Residents [University of Sheffield]
    1. 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.
12. Nature at Night: Eliciting encounters of mutual care through a youth-led citizen science intervention [University of Chester]
    1. 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. This study will produce a fully scoped design for a citizen science intervention to engage young people, an under-represented group within Ecological Citizenship, in nature at night
13. Reconnecting the Web of Life: Digitally integrating science and art to reimagine ecological citizenship [University of Oxford]
    1. How might digital design nurture a deep ecological connection that leads to meaningful change? In partnership with a new nature-connection non-profit, I Stand Beside (ISB), Oxford University’s Nature-based Solutions Initiative (NbSI) 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. 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 relationships.
14. SCARF: Shetland Community Acoustic Research Forum [University of Cumbria]
    1. Using small underwater acoustic recorders deployed on salmon cages, mussel farms and fishing creels, an ambitious collaboration of academics, marine industry groups, citizen scientists and artists will collect information on Shetland’s rich underwater acoustic ecology. SCARF will 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.
15. Watershed Moments: Exploring ecological citizenship with the River Don [Sheffield Hallam University]
    1. 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. Using workshops, interviews and on-site observation, Watershed Moments will investigate how interacting with this platform supports new forms of ecological citizenship, investigating how digital technology can mediate and enable different ways of being a citizen.

The project is investigating how academic research can collaborate with civic communities as project partners through co-creative, truly participatory processes, with the aim of celebrating the diversity of cultures and concerns in communities, hearing from seldom heard voices and understanding the nuances of hyper-local and place-based ecosystems. The Network is looking to understand effective methodologies for tangible, action-focused work that connects people through collaboration with the Everyday Ecosystems that shape our lives, so that, as Ecological Citizens, we can all contribute to acts of positive climate action.
More information about the third funding call can be found on the Ecological Citizen(s) Network+ website.

Ecological Citizen(s) Network+ is led by Dr Rob Phillips (Senior Tutor in MA Design Products / MDes Design Futures, School of Design, RCA) with Professor Sharon Baurley (Director of the RCA’s Materials Science Research Centre) and Tom Simmons (Head of Programme, MA Digital Direction, School of Communication, RCA), in partnership with Professor Sarah West, Centre Director of the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) at the University of York and Professor Alec Shepley of the Faculty of Arts, Computing and Engineering at Wrexham University, as well as a range of non-academic partners from industry, charities, culture and civil society.

Ecological Citizen(s) Network+ follows a number of initiatives at the RCA that have employed design innovation, technology and collaboration to promote awareness of, and increase access to, sustainable processes and products. These initiatives include; The My Naturewatch project, in collaboration with Northumbria Interaction Research Studio, the BBC and The Wildlife Trusts’ #30dayswild programme; the Terra Carta Design Lab – which invites students and alumni to design solutions addressing the climate crisis – as well as work carried out by the College’s Textiles Circularity Centre, funded by UKRI.

Conceptually, the notion of ‘Ecological Citizenship’ was published in a seminal position paper at the prestigious Cumulus Detroit conference in November 2022. This design-led work believes:

EC is defined as “activities that go beyond your own agenda, benefiting the wider ecologies, systems or communities surrounding you” (Phillips, et al., 2022).

As an ever growing research network, Ecological Citizen(s) mobilises diverse groups of people to make impactful change through accessible technology and community-focused approaches – including citizen science, activism, collective learning, advocacy, design strategies, creative arts, manufacturing, environmental science and engineering practices. As a pro-active collaborative community, the network has the potential to cover a wide range of pressing topics from biomaterials and wildlife corridors to local manufacturing and repair, and will draw on expertise from across the RCA, as well as other academic, business and civil society partners.

Ecological Citizen(s) Network+ is a NetworkPlus project funded by EPSRC grant EP/W020610/1 that is focused on digital interventions that would create ‘the conditions to make change’ towards a sustainable post-industrial society.