Dr. Alasdair O’Dell from SAMS (Scottish Association for Marine Science)
Dr Alex Thompson from Seawilding.
Thanks to our MARD cohort and participants: Charline Lallane, Lesley Roberts, Quoi Alexander, Ines Quinones Fabregas, Tom Longmate, Lucy Mitchell, James Harlow, Sami Kimberley and Gabriella Rhodes
A Situated Research week at the Kilchoan Melfort Trust
This September a group of MARD students and graduates engaged in a research week focused on biodiversity approaches. a research project to bring together ecologists and designers to activate place-based biodiversity restoration, research, and collaboration.
The project is supported by the LVMH Maison/0 Challenge Fund, which aims to develop creative collaborations through student and graduate-led engagement. These collaborations are designed around a specific brief or challenge, this year related to ‘Biodiversity’.
Our expedition took place in Scotland, Argyll and Bute, where disciplines intersected, assumptions were challenged, and work was grounded in place, urgency, and local knowledge. In partnership with the Kilchoan Melfort Trust and in connection with the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS), our group carried out hands-on activities to explore and evolve how biodiversity restoration can be practiced. Working with biodiversity requires new modes of interdisciplinary collaboration to understand ecosystem interactions, relations and impact.
Working with ecosystems requires us to work holistically and put the relational whole as the centre of practice. By joining ecology and design, we aim to build a transnational learning networks from different part of the world to Scotland and connect perspectives with local knowledge partners in Scotland.
The aim of the week was to develop new empirical biodiversity methods to enable collaboration between ecologists, designers and local communities. Designing for biodiversity restoration is not just a puzzle to be solved but a quest for restoring new relational capacities in understanding how we are collectively dependent on the diversity of life.
In this first project activation on biodiversity practices we focussed on constructing new interdisciplinary methodologies, interventions and fieldwork focussed on restoration, activated through hands-on learning and the navigating ‘being’ ecosystems.
We explored how collaborative approaches can unlock the potential of biodiversity restoration, demonstrating that this challenge requires new methodologies and an evolution in design practice rather than a single solution. The week’s work laid the foundation for future collaborations and insights. The work was presented in a biodiversity symposiym for the public where we shared our findings, reflections, and next steps in building effective biodiversity alliances.
You can view three short films giving context to our research week