Nige working on a Vertipool with primary school children in 2013.
This year we celebrate 10 years of working in a field that we have come to know as ecological engineering, or ‘ecoengineering’ for short. Next year, 2023, will herald another celebration for us as it will be 10 years since we first installed a Vertipool (artificial rock pool) on a seawall. This is going to be a big milestone for us, because it will mean our Vertipool invention is the oldest continuously functioning retro-fit artificial rock pool system, designed for seawalls, in the world…we think!
Since that first project, we have developed many more lifecycle resources for wildlife and people, all using our own mix of science, art and philosophy as a drivers of invention and innovation. The journey we have taken with our organisation (Artecology) has been an interesting one. We have gone from standalone research collaboration project; to becoming a business; to completing company merger, and now finally resolving as research & development department of Arc Biodiversity & Climate.
During our decade long journey, two words, ‘growth’ and ‘scale’, have followed us around pretty much the whole time! The expectation that one must grow one’s business in order to scale manufacturing and service outputs seems rooted in a capitalist lore that is hard to escape. For us at Artecology this has represented something of a dilemma because, on the one hand, company growth would certainly help to ensure our future as an organisation, but on the other hand scaling the manufacture of our ecoengineered wildlife habitats would mean industrialising our making processes, so dumbing down the complexity of the things we make. Whilst the prospect of losing the special bioreceptive qualities we are able to attain from the handmade-ness of our products is something we don’t want at all, the dilemma runs deeper still and can be best demonstrated with this set questions: -
How do we grow without becoming part of the environmental crisis problem?
How do we scale without running the risk of third parties using our products for greenwashing?
How do we expand our reach and stay true to our core values built on the Foundation Capitals - Natural, Social and Cultural?
Over the years we have looked at this growth and scale conundrum from many of angles and perspectives, and, whichever way we address it the answer always comes back the same - We can’t grow using orthodox business growth modelling without becoming ‘part of the problem’.
We realised some time ago that what we need is a growth strategy that works to harmonise our input and outputs with the natural world, and that will allow us to increase the distribution of our life enhancing products & placemaking methodologies whilst elevating our income in a way that will better secure future the of our work, and also ensure our products and services go exactly where they’re needed,… and for all the right reasons. The clue as to how we might achieve all this, as it turns out, was there all along, contained within the story of our humble beginnings, when our first-ever Artecology project started ten years ago.
Communities discovering the ‘secret’ world of Artecology.
Society has always been central to the way we have developed our ideology and Artecology manufacturing methods, so it is natural that we think society/community will take us to our next level of organisational ‘growth’. In our tenth year of Artecology, working alongside our mother company Arc Biodiversity & Climate, you can expect to see us grow our society engagement with scaled-up project delivery at home and abroad. We are calling our new initiative ‘Artecology CoCreate™️‘. Primarily it will involve lots of training opportunities; we aim to deliver more manufacturing skills & knowledge transfer workshops for groups, especially young people; we want to increase our interactions with schools (Key stage 1-4) to mesh with OFTEDs Cultural Capital initiative; we’ll be seeking more collaborations with colleges & universities, and we’ll train a new cohort of Artecology CoCreate™️ trainers so that our proven approaches to manufacturing and ‘Shaping Better Places’ for wildlife and people can spread to wherever they are needed. Much of this work will be carried out through collaborations with existing organisations; local, national and international. They will include Local Authorities, national and international governments, as well as NGOs, charities and universities specialising in working with communities.
Children rock pooling in our Vertipools.
This is how we see our future unfolding, it is one that promotes a kind of growth and scaling that has very little to do with planet damaging orthodox business ‘Growth Imperative’ based solely on intensifying outputs. Instead, Artecology CoCreate™️ is centred on working into the future in a way that sits comfortably with our own core values and Shaping Better Places ideology & methodology, whilst creating repeatable ‘region by region’ place based regeneration by helping society to build resilient future ready communities (*people and wildlife).
*Community = The community of living things in a particular place. This includes human beings and all other species.