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Ceremony as Legal-Design Method for More-Than-Human Design Education
Crisp, Tom (2025) Planetary Pedagogies. In: MOTH Festival of Ideas, 14-16 May 2026, NYU London 265 Strand, London WC2R 1BH. (Unpublished)
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Abstract / Summary
Design education is continually expected to address the nested critical challenges of our planetary crisis. Yet design education remains largely anthropocentric, continuing to privilege human-centred design and agency. Even as awareness of designing as ecological systems and incorporating planetary worldviews grows, the pedagogical structures that train future designers continue to operate within extractive and individualist logics that marginalise the agencies, knowledges, and relations of the more-than-human.
Planetary Pedagogies explores how ceremony, understood not as an import from other cultures but as a relational technology that western modernity has largely forgotten, can serve as a method for reimagining design-based pedagogy as a place-based ecological practice. The research documents an eight-month pedagogic experiment, Ecological Citizenship (Eco-Cit), at Falmouth University, in which weekly peer-led gatherings of students, staff, and community members generated their own governance through the act of meeting in circle, collectively determining what to learn, and establishing shared norms through repeated practice. Post-hoc reflection on this experience revealed six pedagogic terrains of being: recurring modes of ecological engagement, each held by a corresponding ontological territory, that defined the gatherings as an implicit ceremonial legal-design space. By legal-design space, this paper means a designed process through which communities generate, enact, and renew collective obligations through embodied practice.
The terrains also revealed that while the more-than-human was present in the content of the experiment, it was not yet integral to the process. The Co-Creation Council was therefore developed to extend the ceremonial jurisdiction across this threshold. Convening educators and learners as a multispecies coalition, the Council utilises kin-objects as co-educators, translating relational insights into pedagogical forms through embodied mapping and storytelling. By collectively navigating the ontological territories through five ceremonial phases, each performing a distinct legal-design function, a planet-centred, place-based educational geography forms. Traversed differently by each community, this geography uncovers its own pluriverse of living, symbiotic planetary pedagogies and legal-design forms.
| Item Type: | Conference or Workshop Item (Paper) |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | more-than-human rights, ceremony, legal design, ontological terrain, planetary pedagogy, relational ontology, Indigenous jurisprudence, design education |
| Subjects: | Creative Art & Design Education Sustainability & Environment |
| Department: | Fashion & Textiles Institute |
| Related URLs: | |
| Depositing User: | Tom Crisp |
| Date Deposited: | 07 Jul 2026 13:52 |
| Last Modified: | 07 Jul 2026 13:52 |
| URI: | https://repository.falmouth.ac.uk/id/eprint/6539 |
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