Communications Designer + Project Manager
Future Gardens: Where every place is the story of its own becoming.
Principle Designer | Kelly Skye
At the Center for the Force Majeure, I was the lead communications designer and project manager for several Future Garden projects. These gardens are scientific experiments, public gardens, and works of art that exhibit climate-adapted micro-biomes which can move into an ecoregion as it undergoes increasing flood and drought events. Our outreach resulted in future gardens being developed in central California, Scotland, and the Tibetan Plateau.
Art + Science + Climate adaption
The central question asked in each Future Garden public exhibit is: what plants will live in your bioregion when the temperature increases and rainfall becomes more erratic? In collaboration with local botanists, we are working to answer this question by choosing naturalized plant ensembles and testing their resilience under increased temperatures. All this occurs in a sculptural public garden and art exhibit with a surprising poetic narrative running through it.
Future Garden for California's Central Coast
The newly finished greenhouse domes built by the Force Majeure Center in collaboration with the Institute of Arts and Sciences at UC Santa Cruz. For this installation I directed fundraising, project management, experimental design and research development. I also designed and wrote promotional materials for telling the story of the garden. This permanent public exhibit opened May 2019.
Each year thousands of people visit the gardens. Several conferences and academic events have also been held on the grounds, and they have created fresh space for dialogue around the challenging issue of rapid climate change.
“Future Gardens generate biodiversity fields, which can self-replicate in virtuous cycles, expanding and improving the ecoregion as they develop.”
— Center for the Force Majeure