Adira Andlay

Sense of Place is a toolkit designed to facilitate individual explorations of place-based interactions. Rooted in participatory design workshops conducted across scales and locations, it explores how people develop associations with different elements in their environment. 

Almost defined as a sixth sense, place identity is a personal compass built on the fusion of memory and spatial perception. People's connection to a place is often subconscious, and things which were once obviously noticeable dull into the noise of daily living. In an ever-evolving dynamic society, our place identities are deeply altered by social and cultural factors that transform over time. Inspired by these continual shifts, Sense of Place explores the use of boundary objects as communicative workshop tools to understand people’s perception of ecology, public policy and built environments. Based on this design process, the kit consists of three parts – an outdoor companion, an abacus and a supplementary card set – where each physical object is designed to encourage people to pay attention to their local surroundings. Intended to be used multiple times in the same location, the kit guides an individual to ground their own unique journey, thereby promoting urban health and well-being.

This project addresses the emotional and cognitive impact of Covid-19 faced by students (ages 12-15), providing a digital platform in the form of an SEL Tool to assist their experience of classroom learning.

The lived experience of the pandemic has been extremely difficult for populations across the world, with children being one of the most vulnerable groups in this category. With recurring themes of loneliness experienced during online learning and fatigue from being physically back in a classroom set-up, children have reported high levels of stress and low levels of connection over the last three years. Keeping in mind the rigorous educational structures in Japan, this tool was developed to support pain points of concentration and memory processes in a learning environment. Involving the role of teachers as facilitators, this platform can be used as a risk-assessment companion to evaluate a student’s social and emotional learning needs. In the form of a digital diary to record their emotional (loneliness) and cognitive (mental fatigue) states with respect to learning, teachers can identify patterns and deliver tailored curriculum to optimise learning.

The Coronavirus pandemic has brought a monumental shift in perceptions of planetary health and human well-being. In the last three years, numerous studies have been analysing the causes and impact of Covid-19 in medicine, ecology, psychology, and socio-cultural fields. The list is endless – and no one field can be removed from the other, as there is no one satisfactory approach that will enable us to understand the depths of change that have taken place.

This dissertation is a multidisciplinary investigation of the layers of the pandemic from environmental and humanistic approaches. By adopting these various lenses, I attempt to demystify the complex interplay between biodiversity loss and human interaction with nature. Through creating an interdisciplinary framework, I explore the relationship between environment and infectious disease emergence, theories of human ecology and my positioning as a designer in the ecological realm.

In this collection of essays that explore the human experience in tandem with the ecosystem, I journey the reader from an objective, broader scope to a subjective, context-driven narrative. Reading this paper is like cutting into a piece of the earth – the depth is formed by the layered accumulation of different perspectives that have evolved over each other. The key question threads these approaches together, ultimately asking, what does ecology mean to us, and what will we choose to remember from this time that we lived?