Becoming MARD'NESS : MA Regenerative Design 2022-24 At Central Saint Martins

PRESS ROOM

23 Mar

Written By Debbie Mckeegan

Image By Courtesy of CENTRAL SAINT MARTINS

Graduating this year, our first cohort of MA Regenerative Design students have been navigating simultaneously digital and local ecosystems and practicing within their communities - testing how to influence ecological and social change in a world where everything is interconnected.

Since first coming together in 2022, MA Regenerative Design (MARD) students and staff have been in deep collaboration mode, closely connected to each other and to their geographical communities of human and more-than-human life.

Rethinking design as an act of care for the wellbeing of our earth as a living system, MA Regenerative Design puts profit for ecology first.

Students are helping to restore and find new ways of living respectfully with our world and all its co-habitants. Course Leader Judith van den Boom describes MARD as a “activating testbed and learning space where practitioners from different fields of design can zoom out of human-centric thinking and return to practice from a deeper ecological and relational understanding.”

This online learning community moves dynamically between different design disciplines, fluidly operating between the online, the local and the global.

Working with care for situatedness, connectedness and belonging, learning is placed in the context of everyone’s various practices and geographies.

For the mid-career art and design professionals from around the world, theirs is “a practice of ecological re-imagination”, concerned with building ecosystem communities and possibility, opening up new perspectives on our world.

MARD’NESS

Judith’s ambition for the course is that students develop place-based practices, connecting the local and global, forming an expanded network of practice and rhizome community that supports biodiversity, place and species and fosters new learning and knowledge.

There is a real energy when the students connect and when guest speakers from around the world challenge current notions on regeneration.

With applications open for 2024-25, the idea is to shape the course in a regenerative way, in content and logistics and create an online course that is rooted in place.

The online format works as a connective platform, where students are working together, connected in social and critical engagement, building dialogue with each other and expanding into an extensive network outside of Central Saint Martins. In ecology nothing operates on its own, and the course wants to do this justice by operating as an interconnected living system.

In the spirit of this identity, MARD spills out of the online space and into other online and physical situations.

The course has been moving around and collaborating with others, including a collaborative unit with MA Architecture.

It has also given opportunities for students to join around the globe, most recently in a collaboration with the Tina weaving community in Palawan in the Philippines.