A Voice to Soil
Embedding the point of view of the soil in the Soil Association
Type of work: Co-design, facilitation, and strategy work
The Soil Association is a British NGO. For over 80 years, they have been influencing the UK government on food, farming and forestry policy. They support businesses in growing and serving sustainable food and inspire everyone to be a force for nature. They dreamed of having the voice of soil better represented in their internal organisation.
Community Spirit
We organised a no-human persona workshop with representatives from different departments of the Soil Association in and around their Bristol office, including policymakers, marketing, funding, accounting, and public relations. The non-human persona workshop is used often when you want to become a more life-centered organisation, and you want to include the point of view of nature in your work. It involves immersing yourself in nature and combining scientific data with participatory research. Together, teams create narratives from, in this case, the soil, which helps them improve their understanding of soil, which allows the employees to be better advocates for soil.
Intelligent Adaptation
One of the objectives of the Soil Association was to turn participants of the non-human persona workshop into advocates for the soil within the organisation, and for them to be able to deliver the same workshop to colleagues in their departments. So we viewed the original workshop we facilitated as the prototype, from which we could learn together with the participants. By reflecting on the workshop together, we learned what needed to change for them to facilitate it themselves.
Longterm Stewardship
We never work alone. Although we work remotely, we involve our clients from the start of the creative process. By designing a Playbook for the Voice of Soil together with Chloe Smee, Head of Innovation at the Soil Association, she really felt ownership over the project as one of the leading advocates for the voice of the soil in the organisation
How did nature inspire us during the project?
In this project, nature, biodiversity and how we can bring the point of view into an organisation were the entire objective of the project. We created a voice for soil by actually taking the participants on an immersive experience to physically connect with soil using our non-human persona guide. We developed this guide after we created our original non-human persona, giving glacial lake Ibon de Plan a voice.
The voice of soil
Do you want to give nature a voice in your organisation? Or are you curious about how to run a design project with nature in mind?