Brooklyn Seed Lab
The Brooklyn Seed Lab is a speculative design project that imagines environmental futures through fictional seed catalogs. Brooklyn Seed Lab is imagined as a community seed library, food farm, and biodesign space that provides local plants, pollinators, and biodesigns to future residents of New York City. The catalog reflects a changing environment and highlights issues such as drought, extinction, global warming, and other events related to the climate crisis. Some of the elements in the catalog are squarely in the realm of design fiction, such as bionic birds and biomates, or living garden companions that bring biology and technology together in novel ways. At the same time, there are familiar everyday elements that you might find in any contemporary seed catalog, such as varieties of fruiting trees, herb gardens, and helpful tips about grafting and pollination.
The Seed Catalog was part of the After Progress Exhibition, sponsored by The Sociological Review Foundation, the MA Ecology, Culture & Society, and the Unit of Play, Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London, September 2021.
The project utilizes creative commons images from the Biodiversity Heritage Library and aims to create a slightly unbalanced sense of time. The images evoke a vintage feeling to both reference old-fashioned seed catalogs as well as to suggest a step back towards ways of living that are more environmentally-friendly. However the items in the catalog reflect a future world that is steeped in technology, still tinkering with plants and animals, and pushing further towards the possibilities of biotech. This juxtaposition explores that ways in which we might balance technological development with more traditional environmental practices that have been with us for millennia.The seed catalog is meant to open up conversations about the future of food, plants, animals, urban gardening, and collective, community-based practices.
View project at: brooklynseedlab.com
