Phygital Design Studio

ORIGIN_XXX

40 years ago, my parents climbed trees after school to catch bugs and collected seashells when the tide was low.

15 years ago, my friends and I rode the subway after school, went to game centers, and hung out at the malls.

I could find my favorite crane machine in the mall maze, just like my dad could find where the biggest crawfish was among fish ponds.

Shanghai 1984-1988

My parents were around 15.

Shanghai 2013-2016

I was around 15.

Lujiazui area of Shanghai in 1985 (top) and 30 years later (bottom).

Photographs courtesy of Liu Heung Shing

My memories of growing up in Shanghai are woven between glass facades and concrete. Most of the trees and plants in the city were part of the designed landscape, pruned as they grew into spaces of human activity. For me, nature is a vacation destination, something out of the ordinary, completely detached from everyday life.

In just one generation, the baseline of Shanghai's nature-city balance has degenerated from forests, rivers, and ubiquitous wildlife to gardens, lawns, and roadside shrubs. Such a rapid "baseline shift" is unprecedented on planet Earth.

This is how our nature is slipping away, not only in reality, but also in our minds.

1950s

Shifting Baseline Syndrome is a gradual change in the accepted norms for the condition of the natural environment due to a lack of experience, memory and/or knowledge of its past condition, coined by Daniel Pauly in 1995.

Put simply, what we now consider a healthy environment was considered degraded by past generations, and what we now consider degraded will be considered healthy or "normal" by the next generation.

1980s

Source: McLENACHAN, L.(2009), Documenting Loss of Large Trophy Fish from the Florida Keys with Historical Photographs, Conservation Biology, 23: 636-643.

Photographs courtesy of Monroe Public Library

As Soga and Gaston (2018) argue, without memory, knowledge, or experience of past environmental conditions, current generations cannot perceive how much their environment has changed because they are comparing it to their own “normal” baseline and not to historical baselines.

As cities continue to expand, nature is gradually being pushed away from areas of human activity. People in cities need only pay what the price tag says, and the goods magically appear at their doorstep. If we continue to consume natural resources endlessly, the ecosystem will collapse sooner than we think. But by recognizing the objective changes in the natural environment, we can also react and push the baseline back to a healthier level.

ORIGIN_XXX uses AR technology to project a fraction of the material’s origin directly onto the product, so that the pricelessness of nature is no longer obscured by a price tag. The pattern on each product is linked in AR to a different environment, restoring the uniqueness of the material as a life form before it is processed into a uniform size. Human and artifact, no longer as buyer and purchased, but as one living organism to another, see each other as equals.