​Adaptive Ecologies & Climate Extremes
I have always been curious about Beyond-the-Human elements and their intersection with design. Through traveling with Odde Research Centre and its ontological and epistemological perspectives, I learned and employed unique inductive research methods in critical bio-diverse environments. I explored design research at the intersection of nature and culture in its blurred boundaries.
Odde Research Centre
Lab
Dr. Deepta Sateesh
Dr. K.V Gururaja
Guidance
Thresholds and Tapestries
Lab Project
The Western Ghats
"The mountain chain of the Western Ghats represents geomorphic features of immense importance with unique biophysical and ecological processes. The site’s high montane forest ecosystems influence the Indian monsoon weather pattern. Moderating the tropical climate of the region, the site presents one of the best examples of the monsoon system on the planet. It also has an exceptionally high level of biological diversity and endemism and is recognized as one of the world’s eight ‘hottest hotspots’ of biological diversity. The forests of the site include some of the best representatives of non-equatorial tropical evergreen forests anywhere and are home to at least 325 globally threatened flora, fauna, bird, amphibian, reptile and fish species." - UNESCO
Ways of Listening in The Western Ghats
A Nature-Culture Continuum
LOCATION
Kuduremukha, Western Ghats, India
DURATION
5 weeks, November 2022
TEAM MEMBER
Heli Motanpothra
PROJECT TYPE
Design Research,
Data Visualisation, Mapping
RESEARCH AREAS
Movement Research,
Ecology,
Nature-Culture Continuum,
Preservation-Conversation,
Vernacular Materials
LEARNINGS
Visual Data Mapping,
Documenting and Recording Complex Relations
Introduction
In the transdisciplinary research project at Odde Research Center, we focused on understanding relations amongst nature and human dwellers, in the village of Maala, nestled in the foothills of Kudremukha. We engaged with local knowledges of materials, biodiversity, water and land, cultivation and food practices, to unravel deep socio-ecological relationships that are adaptive and responsive to the atmosphere, earth and other-than-human co-inhabitants. We engaged with broader themes of movement, ecology, and temporal appropriations of space and time.
We engaged with India’s Biodiversity Act (2002), in particular the mandate of the People’s Biodiversity Register. This enabled me to develop critical questions around enviro-legal concerns and community knowledge/practices in sensitive ecologies. Simultaneously, built creative research practices, understand new kinds of data, how to record complex relations, and synthesize these findings
Research Plan
Secondary Research
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Biodiversity of Western Ghats
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Scared forests
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Cultural practices
Black pepper is endemic to the Western Ghats of India, it played a vital role in trade and sea routes of colonial India. Understanding the inherent traits and movement of black pepper pods of pepper plants which is an endemic species to the Western Ghats allowed us to map similar movements endemic to the tropical rain forest. This was the basis to extract lens of movement observed in the primary engagements; Movement lens adopted - breathing, stretching and decaying.
Primary Research
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Maala, foothills of Western Ghats
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Kudremukha, peak in Western Ghats
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Heritage Village, Udupi Manipal
Ways of listening in the Western Ghats emphasised on the observation and documentation that needs to be employed in the field for primary research through primary engagements. In this project, each primary location has unique elements of nature, people, material, traditional knowledge and practices coming together to for a nature-culture continuum where one is symbiotic with the other. This complexity was recorded in ways unique of each of the primary location as the relationship between multiple elements vary in each of the locations. Thus we adopted wayfaring as a method of observation; and images, sketches, journals, elaborate notes of observations and audio as methods of documentations.
Synthesis
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Visual data mapping
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Themes of preservation and conservation
Visual mapping of the ground into non-linear plots. The plots were influenced by the multiple observation methods adopted in the primary engagements to capture the ecology, movement, moments and relationship between nature and culture at their thresholds of merging.
Interconnections and relationships between visual mapping the four individual sites of primary engagement were mapped. Critical lens to conservation and preservation through daily practices to planned preservation efforts allowed further analysis into relationship between local cultural practices and conservation. The four sites - Kudremukha, heritage village, Maala, and a heritage home.
Way Forward
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Questions on regional preservation and conversation practices
"Mapping, analysis and the observations led us to rethink the ideas of conservation and preservation that we had been carrying in our minds. Amidst the ancient buildings and artefacts that have existed for a few hundred years, we questioned if the homes were conserved or preserved and what these two words meant in the context of the surroundings that we were in.
Are conservation and preservation even different? If so, what is it that distinguishes them?"
"We appreciate conservation and preservation for their importance and understand them in a new light. Further through experience, pondering, analysing and understanding through fieldwork, we believe this could be taken forward. We could look further into the nature of conservation and preservation in the Western Ghats, both the built environment, nature and its thresholds."
Kundapura | Adaptive Ecologies
Nature-Culture Continuum - Conservation in Climate Extremes
ROLE
Student Researcher
LOCATION
Kundapura, Karnataka, India
DURATION
5 Weeks, April 2023
PROJECT TYPE
Design Research,
Transdisciplinary Research
RESEARCH AREAS
Movement Research,
Socio-ecological Relations,
Environmental Planning,
Design & Data,
LEARNINGS
Visual Data Mapping,
Documenting and Recording Complex Relations
Introduction
The Kundapura Estuary (Panchagangavali) is a confluence of multiple ecotones (Neimanis 2012), continually shifting and shaping the environment. These ecotones include mangroves, barrier islands (bengre), river islands (kudru), sand bars, forests sacred groves, swamps, multitude waterways that are home to aquatic creatures and human dwellings, ancient cultural practices, and material movements. Human
practices here include fishing, cultivating paddy, coconut, areca nut, bamboo, tile-making, pottery, weaving, as well as trade in markets along the coast and across the seas, that supplement the local economies.
In this region, there have been multiple development projects to support economic growth, including a desalination plant, urea plant, coastal highway projects, and a surge of tourist and residential projects that require flattening of the hilly coastal terrain or reshaping and demarcating land from water in the plains and coast. However, in recent years, the unprecedented changes in the landscape during the monsoon
season have demonstrated a lack of understanding of how to work with unpredictable weather patterns, resulting in water scarcity, floods and landslides between the Western Ghats mountains and the Arabian Sea.
Alongside climate change, we believe that there is a gap in the way development and infrastructures are conceptualized, designed and built. These gaps (in understanding weather and excluding it) emerge from a reductive recording of data (drawn from disciplinary frames) that do not include the complexities on the ground, rain and material conditions, excluding change. In this project we responded to these concerns and gaps, and uncover the dynamics and operations of terrain to shift understandings and possibly paradigms.
Research Plan
01 Secondary Research
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Movement research
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Geography, adaptive ecology of coastal town of Kundhapura
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Wet Ontologies
02 Contextual Inquiry
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Furthering the understanding of preservation and conservation in the context of regional practices and estuaries of Kundhapura
03 Primary Research
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Sand Beaches, Sea, Estuaries, Fishing Ports in Kundapura, Karnataka, India
04 Data Collection
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Visual and audio data was collected in all the primary engagements locations
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Walking and immersion was employed for the primary engagements
05 Synthesis
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Visual mapping and plotting
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Journey mapping
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Themes of preservation and conservation were analysed in conversation with the regional cultural practices
06 Way Forward
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Questions on regional preservation and conversation practices emerged in the study
Secondary Research
Changing terrain of Kundapura
Over the years the ecology of Kundapura has significantly changed. One of the prominent changes is due to human intervention of building sea walks and ports along the Kodiand Gangolli delta point, reshaping the terrain of the estuary where the rivers and sea meet. Also, there are natural formations and movement of sandbars during the monsoons.The satellite images from 2010 to 2022 help capture these changes
Interconnections between temporal aqueous ecotones and regional practices of Kundapura
Primary Research
Existing practices & socio-economic terrain of Kundapura
Researching by moving with water - by adopting a beyond-human perspective, the intention was to reduce the centring of humans in the aqueous ecology and to increase the understanding about the many viewpoints gained through attempting to adopt a non-human perspective. Immersing in the estuary’s water and interacting with it revealed the intricate and unpredictable aspects of the ecosystem, deepening the understanding of the water’s volume, vastness, depth, and temporality.
JOURNEY MAP
Fish & fishing practices
Synthesis
A visual data mapping (plotting) of "journey of the fish" - fishing practices in Kundapura estuaries, sea, fishing ports, beaches and local weekly/daily markets (Santes).
I used visual narrative of the journey of fish from sea to land and beyond as a method to capture landscape of fishing practices in Kundapura. I used the two plots to evidence cultural nuances and socio-economic dynamics of the practice particularly between traditional fishing practices and motorised fishing (fishing with motorised boats, trawlers, deep sea fishing). The traditional fishing vs. Persian boats plots fishing enabled me to evidence the conversational practices and kinship embedded in the traditional methods which are present in not-so-obvious ways.
The juxtapositioning of traditional and Persian boats and the fishing practices that they are involved in reveal stark differences between the two. Traditional fishing practices are varied and the communities that practice them inhabit beaches,estuary or lurk near port areas for fishing, whether it be with fishing net or fishing line. The nets used are diverse. They are biodegradable nets made from local plant matter or nylon nets, each in varied sizes. From the fieldwork, it was observed that the fisher folk have a kinship and practice fishing mindfully according to their family and community needs. The catch could go to their families and even extend to neighbours, and local markets. While men fish, women sell the fresh fish, cure the fish and sell dry fish. The work is shared. A lot of physical work goes into fishing, from pushing the boat, throwing the net to maintaining them. Traditional fisher folk engage with the ecotones, read the water movement tactically and work with the terrain.
Plot 1 - Traditional fishing practices
Plot 2 - Motorised fishing with Persian boats
On the other hand, the larger Persian (motorised)boats of Gangoli fishing port do not see much variation in fishing. The process is more linear. They set out to the sea; the catch is predetermined (as much as the boat can hold in its container). They fish using nets and tools that requires lesser manoeuvring and the catch from the net is stored in the containers with ice. The labour is mostly spent on the boat - loading, unloading, packing and transporting. Lots of packaging material, ice, fuel and vehicles are used in the process of transporting the catch from the boat to other markets or factories.
SWOT Analysis
Data gathered in primary research, visual synthesis and journey mapping, allowed insights into regional practices such as fishing. Employing a critical lens to conservation and preservation in the context of these local practices. The SWOT analysis supported further evaluation of current scenarios involving social, economic, environmental, and infrastructure aspects in Kundapura. All the members of the project engaged in making SWOT analysis.
Way forward
Through engaging and immersing in Kundapura’s ecologies, it was observed, experienced, and comprehended, that various factors regarding the values of conservation are ingrained in local culture. This, along with the insights from the plots and design tools motivated us to come up with a set of principles and bring to light the rationale behind proposing these principles. For example, while talking with Babu Moghera, an experienced fisherman who had started fishing since the young age of twelve years, it was known that he will be one of the last generations of fishermen who had not only used a traditional biodegradable net but knows how to make it with traditional materials gathered from the local natural plant material. The prevalence of nylon fishing nets can clearly be seen all around us in the regions popularly known for fishing. The principles may aid in conservation of the aqueous ecology of Kundapura to encourage regional sustainable infrastructure, mindful consumption of natural resources, conserve biodiversity, initiate programmes for the involvement of youth in the protection of ecology and encourage ways of safe disposal of various kinds of wastes.