Introduction
Dara is a speculative design exploration imagining what afforestation in Ireland could look like if restructured around community governance, ecological kinship, and multispecies cohabitation. The project asks: What happens when we give the power and authority to define the terms of ecological restoration? And what speculative infrastructures might emerge to support more-than-human participation?
Context
Ireland has one of the lowest forest cover rates in Europe. Despite ambitious afforestation targets, state-led strategies have often leaned on monoculture planting, top-down governance, and short-term economic incentives. Rural resistance has grown out of the recognition that landscapes are cultural, relational, and historically contested. This project intervenes in that space by imagining not just more forests, but different social contracts with forests.
Problems
Environmental Impact: Carbon sequestration, biodiversity loss, and soil and water degradation.
Community Disconnection: Local farmers and residents feel alienated by top-down afforestation policies.
Cultural and Heritage Loss: Traditional landscapes and cultural narratives are being eroded.
Economic Barriers: High land prices and limited resources hinder small farmers from participating in afforrestation.
Methods
Signal scanning
Tracked socio-ecological frictions from resistance movements to emerging eco-tourism trends
CLA Analysis & STEEP
Revealed the layered imaginaries behind afforestation from carbon metrics to ancestral belonging
World building
Constructed “Dara Village,” a fictional forest community that acts as both narrative prototype and provocation
Artefact design
Created visitor journeys, machine-learning “Tree Ears,” and a post-tour ritual infrastructure to materialise the experience
Tensions
Afforestation vs. Local Autonomy
National forestry goals often clash with community land attachments, making reforestation a site of both ecological ambition and social friction.
Carbon Metrics vs. Cultural Landscapes
Climate targets prioritise measurable outputs (like CO₂ offsets), but neglect the cultural, historical, and multispecies dimensions of rural land.
Empathy vs. Anthropomorphism
Efforts to humanise the forest (e.g. “Tree Ears”) risk flattening the agency of non-human life into metaphors humans can recognise.
Optimism vs. Utopianism
Speculative design often leans hopeful — but whose hope is projected? Our project contended with the limits of optimistic futures that reproduce Eurocentric assumptions.
Speculative narrative
The forest map
Visitor journey
Demos
Reflection
While Dara imagines an alternative afforestation future, it remains critically unfinished. The project exposed our own entanglements with anthropocentric empathy, Eurocentric optimism, and speculative control. Though intended to challenge extractive narratives, we risked reproducing them by projecting human values onto forest systems.
This discomfort became the basis for a continued reflection in Decentring the Designer, where I explore how designers might reposition themselves as situated participants within more-than-human ecologies. The essay expands the questions first provoked by Dara: Are we truly designing beyond human-centred design? Who is centred in our futures? What relations do we foreground or erase? And how do we design without standing outside the systems we seek to transform?