Connecting ecology x design for biodiversity restoration
With the support of Maison/0 LVMH Challenge

I had an opportunity to join the Ecosystem Alliance, a platform founded by Barbara Smith and Judith van den Boom, core members of Central Saint Martins’ MA Regenerative Design team, to foster long-term collaboration between ecologists, designers, and place-based experts.

What can design do for biodiversity, and what can biodiversity do for design? Together, the Alliance will explore how shared practices can better support the living world..

Collaborators included alliance partners and researchers from around the world:

_ Team Kilchoan Melfort Trust

_ Dr. Alex Thomson from Seawilding

_ Dr. Alasdair O’Dell from SAMS

_ Mátyás Csiky from Open Climate Solutions

_ Carole Collet, Director of Maison/0 at Central Saint Martins

_ Alexandre Capelli, LVMH Group Environment Deputy Director

For 10 days in September 2025, the research group worked in partnership with the team of Kilchoan Melfort Trust, a conservation initiative dedicated to restoring biodiversity on a 1,500-acre coastal estate. The estate’s unique mix of terrestrial and marine environments offers a living laboratory for understanding how ecosystems connect and adapt – and support the process to develop new approaches to how design and ecology can work more collaboratively.

Biodiversity doesn’t have a single solution. It asks us to find new ways of working with the changing dynamics of places, species, and communities and to collaborate across disciplines. Restoring biodiversity plays out across many levels, from marine health and material cycles to landscapes, communities, and the wider systems that connect them. This research project explores how design and ecology can come together to support biodiversity in meaningful and applied ways.