a design brief


THE PROBLEM

What does it mean to innovate when creating technologies for ecological purposes? Certainly not by merely generating more ecosystem data, or releasing yet another AI tool to identify species faster. Hundreds of tools like that are currently produced, and few of these meaningfully connect our growing ecosystem awareness to the intricate level of decision-making needed to protect, restore, or adapt to ecosystems. They turn barely living ecosystems into disconnected data fragments further stripped of their vitality.


Ecosystems are not computers. They are alive. What if data systems reflected that vitality?

Pursuing real innovation demands more creative proposals. Avant-garde ideas that are less technology-driven and much more fundamentally engaged with the living planet. It is only in this way that important new ecosystem data can be used to respond to ecological crises.


The main vision of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF), signed by 196 countries, is ‘a world of living in harmony with nature’ by 2050. This calls for technologies that do not just deliver ecosystem data but also embed this global vision into their design. This brief calls for designers, developers, and other future-makers to propose biodiversity data systems that are as alive as the ecosystems they are connected to.


DESIGN OBJECTIVE

Design a data tool or platform that is alive, and grounded in the following three principles:


It must be response-able (capable of engaging with its context rather than merely representing it), organic (inspired by ecosystem processes rather than technical features), and relational (structured around interdependence rather than data fragmentation).


The design may focus on environmental processes at any scale deemed relevant in response to ecological crises – from the lived experiences of individual organisms within an ecosystem to the broader dynamics of planetary systems. Your goal is to spark technological innovation rooted in ecological vitality.



KEY STAKEHOLDERS

  • Living ecosystems, humans, and multi-species entities whose expressions and lives are turned into data.

  • Corporations committed to move beyond impact metrics towards aligning their operations with ecological regeneration and the KMGBF vision.

  • Specialists who collect and work with data including monitoring experts, citizen scientists, ecologists, local communities, and other ecosystem data users.



DESIGN CRITERIA


1. Center vital aesthetics

Data tools must abandon their fixation on computational expressions and attend to the full range of aesthetics that ecosystems evoke. Aesthetics encompass everything that creates meaning for living beings. including sensory perceptions, affective dimensions, hierarchies, and cultural relations. This shapes all experiential aspects of innovation.

To revolutionize design in this domain, designers must identify important qualities of aliveness and relations to broader ecosystem experiences, and let these guide the system’s visual, structural, and interactive elements.


2. Foreground depth

Ecosystems are not flat indicators that merely deliver data. The design must propose collaborative sense-making features that put complex processes, trade-offs, relations, and tensions in full focus.

Foregrounding depth means deliberately connecting biodiversity data to complex ecological and societal challenges to enable further discourse and decision-making. Data systems thereby move from static data repositories to tools that stimulate reflection and action.


3. Align economic value with ecological dynamics

Developing a business case for the implementation of data tools can be important to generate impact across corporate stakeholders. But ecosystems themselves operate on more diverse, adaptive, and long-term dynamics that no business model can fully contain.

The strongest business cases will be those that work within, rather than attempt to override, resilient ecological understandings of value and growth. While existing tools push for further commodification of biodiversity, more ecologically aligned proposals should make value propositions that are already inherent in ecosystems.



DESIGN CONSTRAINTS

Ecologies

Ecosystem knowledge is always partial, shaped by incomplete data, human perspectives, and evolving scientific understandings. Designs must stay open to diverse ways of knowing, yet grounded in ecological integrity. Speculation, intuition, and creative approaches are integral, but should not justify ecological misrepresentation.


Technologies

The design may be conceptual or a prototype, built with existing technologies or imagining new ones. Too often, environmental tools are driven by new technology trends, rather than ecological or socio-political needs. This brief instead requires that technological features emerge from the design’s ecological intentions and not the other way around.


Socio-politics

All designs have socio-political effects. The design must therefore critically consider who and what it serves, and what it thereby risks ignoring. It must provide transparency about how decisions and data shape power across humans and ecosystems. This includes asking how the design contributes to creating regenerative multispecies futures.



WHAT WOULD IT MEAN FOR A DATASET TO BREATHE? HOW DO OTHER LIFEWORLDS INSPIRE MONITORING? WHAT IF GROUND TRUTHING BIODIVERSITY REQUIRED BUILDING CONNECTIONS WITH LOCAL ECOSYSTEMS? WHAT TOOL CAN HELP THE MOST BIZARRE INDICATOR SPECIES EXPRESS THEIR BIODIVERSITY KNOWLEDGE? HOW CAN A NEW DASHBOARD SHOW THAT ECOSYSTEMS ARE NON-DETERMINISTIC AND CHAOTIC? WHAT COULD A VITAL BIODIVERSITY CREDIT SYSTEM LOOK LIKE? WHAT IF ECOSYSTEM ENTITIES COULD DETERMINE HOW THEIR DATA IS USED? HOW CAN MORE VITAL DATA TOOLS HELP CORPORATIONS DRASTICALLY INCREASE THEIR NATURE POSITIVE AMBITIONS? CAN DATA REPORTING PLATFORMS ALSO CENTER BIODIVERSITY RELATIONS THROUGH GRIEF, AWE, OR URGENCY? WHAT IF ENVIRONMENTAL MONITORING TOOLS CAN FORGET, COMPOST, OR EVOLVE? HOW CAN A DATA PLATFORM BRING TWO NON-HUMAN SPECIES IN CONVERSATION WITH EACH OTHER TO RESPOND TO ECOSYSTEM THREATS? WHAT IF DIGITAL TWINS WERE NOT MIRRORS OF ENVIRONMENTS BUT COMPANIONS THAT EVOLVE WITH ECOSYSTEMS? CAN DATA PLATFORMS SURFACE WHAT IS MISSING, NOT ONLY WHAT IS MEASURED? HOW COULD A MORE VITAL METRIC BECOME PART OF CORPORATE SUSTAINABILITY REPORTING? HOW CAN A QUANTITATIVE DATA VISUALIZATION BE REDESIGNED ACCORDING TO VITAL DATA PRINCIPLES? WHAT IF NON-HUMAN SPECIES COULD INITIATE ALERTS IN A DASHBOARD SYSTEM? CAN BIODIVERSITY DATA TOOLS PRACTICE REFUSAL AS RESPONSE TO DATA QUERIES?