Design Researchers in Residence 2022/23: Islands

Responding to the theme of ‘Islands’, the 2022/2023 residents will develop projects that use the island as a lens to think through varying climate challenges.

Islands are defined by the connections formed at their edges: to seas and oceans, and the ecosystems that inhabit them; as well as to other islands, both nearby and further afield.

Rather than isolated units implied by an ‘island mentality’, they are better imagined as interdependent nodes in networks. This September, the first Islands Forum will bring representatives of island communities around the UK to Orkney, north-eastern Scotland, to discuss their common challenges in the age of the climate crisis. With over 6,000 separate islands making up the 'British Isles', the UK itself is better understood as a vast and diverse archipelago than any kind of singular nation.

Indeed, in an era of hyperconnectivity – when submarine cables run from Canada to Southport and from Japan to Cornwall, broadcasting messages and images from the entire planet – the idea of any insular landmass seems misplaced. Arguably it always has. The wealth of this ‘Small Island’ is inseparable from its former colonies; its historic investment in material extraction and fossil capital directly leading to the environmental catastrophes affecting island communities around the world today.

The 2022/23 cohort of Design Researchers in Residence will engage with the continuum of isolation and interconnectedness that is implied in the island, as an environmental, geographical and social construct.

Design Researchers in Residence is Future Observatory’s programme for design research into the climate crisis hosted at the Design Museum. The residency supports thinkers at the start of their careers to develop new research on environmental concerns and centred around a particular theme.

The residency has two main aims: to provide design researchers in the early stages of their careers time and space away from their regular environment to develop and produce new work, and to offer museum visitors an opportunity to engage with live design research projects.

Each year the residency accommodates four researchers, working in different design disciplines, to further develop their individual responses to the theme and brief. The programme culminates with a publication and final showcase at the Design Museum, due to open in June 2023. Each resident is provided with a commissioning budget of £6,000, which goes directly towards producing the work in the display. A bursary of £11,400 is also offered to support the development of their career and to fund their practice.

The Design Researchers in Residence programme builds upon the Design Museum’s Designers in Residence programme, which ran from 2007–2020. The revised residency programme, now in its second year, continues to provide emerging designers and researchers with time and space away from their regular environment to develop impactful new projects that contribute to design research into the climate crisis taking place across the country. The 2021/22 Design Researchers in Residence were Thomas Aquilina, Delfina Fantini van Ditmar, Samuel Iliffe and Sanne Visser, who responded to the theme of ‘Restore’.

The applications for this year's cohort closed in September 2022. The open call for the next cohort of Design Researchers in Residence will go live in summer 2023.

Background image: Rising Sea Levels by Susan Wright; residents' portraits by Anselm Ebulue.