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ISSUE #49

DESIGN & NATURE REIMAGINED

MARISA MORBY​

The journal Nature had an article this week that highlighted that changing people's minds about climate change works best with personal stories. When people hear stories about how climate or nature has impacted them, people listen and take it to heart.
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Telling stories was the basis for this newsletter. I wanted to find ways to connect people with nature and bring hope through small stories about our natural world. This is what our reality is built on. The stories we tell ourselves, the stories we tell others, and the stories we feel make us who we are.

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design

If you ask five people to tell you what they think design is, you'll likely get five different answers. For me, design is solving problems in the most elegant way possible. It's being able to take a problem, find its root, and figure out how to solve it. And one of the best ways to communicate design and this problem solving process is through storytelling. Ellen Lupton's book, Design is Storytelling, talks about how good design brings ideas to life. She discuses how you can use visual and information design to create and show impactful stories that resonate. It's a beautifully visual book with bright illustrations that break down the story making process.

nature

There are so many wonderful stories being told about nature and our place in it. I wanted to highlight a few of my favorite. Stories and good conversation release dopamine, oxytocin, endorphins, and other biochemicals that give us a sense of well-being. This chemical release makes them emotional for us. Our brains are hardwired to remember stories rather than facts, and we remember them up to 22 times better than just facts alone. Storytelling is one of the most powerful ways we can move those around us.

• ​Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake
• ​Wild Souls by Emma Marris
• ​The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf
• ​The Overstory by Richard Powers
• ​The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben
• ​All We Can Save an anthology edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson

What are some of your favorite stories about nature?

reimagine

As I was trying to come up with a piece for this segment of the newsletter I wrote down a bunch of questions for art I could try and investigate. Design and nature collaborators? Stories of natural disasters that have inspired change? Stories of restoration?
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All of these sounded okay but the more I thought about it the more I wanted to talk about imagining new stories we can tell about or in nature. And oddly enough that got me thinking about the video game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Winters in the Pacific Northwest start out very cozy and delightful. It's misty, the light is at a perfect angle where it makes everything glow, there's a chill in the air and it feels like you're on the set of Halloweentown (that movie was filmed in St. Helen's, Oregon, so it checks out).

By January though, it is a slog. It's been raining for awhile. The chill is there but you're getting sick of it, and it's dark by 5pm, which was very cute and very hygge in November but by January you just want to lay in some sun. Anyway, I'm not bitter about it, but by January when I'm not out walking in the rain (because you have to get out or you'll lose it), I often play Zelda.
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What I didn't realize until about a year ago was that I only play this game in the winter. And that's because I'm mainly playing it as an escape. A place to enjoy sunny days and only the occasional rainstorm. A place with huge open landscapes where I can ride horses and explore tall snow-capped mountains. The landscape graphics are gorgeous. You have to gather ingredients and cook them to make potions (living off the land, who knew!), there are flowers that glow at night, and the sunrises are beautiful. Sometimes I'll take the horse out and climb up a ridge just to watch the sun rise. They have woven nature into the storyline and made it come alive as its own character with moods and secrets. It's an imaginative and inspiring way to include nature inside a digital world.