unit-code
Forests contain untold stories and unread secrets, histories and predictions communicated through complex networks in the soil and through the air. Forests are entangled and enchanted, messy, complex, full of mystery and mythology. They are simultaneously composing and decomposing and are constantly on the move. Forests are misleading, forbidding and wild. If you don’t keep your wits about you and your pockets full of breadcrumbs, they could lead you astray and you may never find your way home again.
This year, Design Studio 8 stepped into the woods, cultivating unique understandings of, and relationships with, the notion of time within the forest. Through initial investigations situated within the peri-urban woodlands scattered across London, we sought to frame the forest no longer as an element ‘external’ to the city, but as the archetype through which to understand it. These investigations looked beyond the physical properties of the sites, exploring the communities, hidden policies and histories that dictated and formed these landscapes. We also examined how the seemingly endless time of the woods sits in contrast to the limited time we have in the face of a looming climate emergency.
Throughout the year, students worked with Flimwell Park in East Sussex. Over a series of visits and workshops across the seasons, Flimwell acted as the studio’s experimentarium and escape. As a collective we became active agents within the landscape – trailblazing, mapping, foraging and constructing small-scale interventions sited in the surrounding woodlands. These 1:1-scale experiments directly informed the individual design projects carried out in the studio and acted as opportunities for exploration, risk and discovery.
Design Studio 8 look to develop practices of experience-based experimentation, designing through being and doing. We approach the land and city with open minds, embracing accidents and flexing to accommodate unexpected results. We encourage experimentation and challenge standard practice to support an environment of discovery and innovative process and thinking. Fostering a shared and supportive practice, we operate as individuals in a broader ecosystem with a collective purpose.