Mapping making and nature interations in UK and Indonesia

This British Council funded project seeks to identify and map makers (designers and craftspeople) working in ways that may directly support and enable biodiversity and habitat restoration and conservation as a result of their productive activities.

The project identified and engaged with practices in both UK and Indonesia that were seeking to enact sustainable making and had explicit aspirations to better support nature conservation.

There are diverse ways in which makers interact and / or ‘notice’ nature and ways in which their interactions manifests through their material methods and products.

There is an identified gap in the knowledge regarding the direct nature of this relationship and better expressing and understanding its ecological value. There is a need to develop stronger ecological input and collaboration to better understand how to optimise the latent Nature-Net-Gain that can be derived through sustainable development and how to communicate this to audiences and customers.

The project used a range of ethnographic, digital mapping and eco-system visualisations to understand maker's perspectives on their interactions with nature through natural material practices resulting in an open data map.