Co-designing Forests

This research project is a collaboration between Forestry England and design-researcher Liam Healy (based at Goldsmiths, University of London), that will work in conversation with those who visit and dwell in forests to design forms of access to them. We will explore how the design of paths and trails might be harnessed to contribute to woodland health, sustainability and expansion. We see the fun and joyous experiences of being, playing, and moving through the woods as an excellent opportunity to bring diverse groups into conversations and actions around the future of forests.

Spending time in and providing access to woodlands is increasingly recognised as important for physical and mental human wellbeing, but this needs to be done carefully to protect and maintain those natural places; we need to tread lightly. Since the COVID-19 pandemic Forestry England have found that visits to their woodlands have dramatically increased, and in some cases, this has brought about conflicts and new challenges. At the same time, expanding forests and woodlands has become an increasingly important means for addressing the climate emergency, and in the UK tree planting has become a key governmental policy. However, researchers have pointed out the importance of involving local communities in the process of woodland creation, planning and planting to ensure the long-term support, sustainability and care of trees. This research will investigate the ways these two factors might be harnessed so that increasing interest in access to forests can contribute to re-foresting and forest health, produce more resilient and culturally rich environments, and at the same time improve the health of visitors and forest dwellers.

The research will work with local communities to design alternative forms of paths and trails that work with the health and expansion of woodlands in mind. We aim to make paths that contribute to the forest instead of destroying it by thinking about how different materials, route design, features and planting can improve and work with the environment.

We will do this by running a series of design workshops over the course of three years in sites around the Southwest of England, that local communities are warmly invited to participate in alongside stakeholders and decision makers. The workshops will involve a broad cross section of woodland communities, including walkers, foresters, trees, conservation groups, cyclists, animals, horse-riders, landowners, fungi, and plants (what we call more-than-human forest communities). In these workshops we will imagine different possible futures for the UK's forests, and look for ways to make them more culturally rich, bio-diverse, and inclusive (to both humans and non-humans). We will work with several design methods during these sessions, including speculative and participatory design, sketching and prototyping, as well as working on the ground to build new trails and features with nature in mind.

By the end of the project, we will have worked with several local communities and forestry experts to dream up, design, and prototype a series of trails and features, observed and evaluated how they get used, published our findings in various conferences, and reported our results back to the local communities through a series of inclusive exhibitions.