Inés Quinones Fábregas, Spain
@lab_for_EP
www.endemicpractices.com
Instead of starting with data or classification, I began by spending time outside, walking, touching, listening. By the shore, I noticed some seaweed species whose identity changed with the tides. Partly terrestrial, partly marine, these beings made me reflect on the concept of relational identity and relational belonging. As opposed to our more static and detached identity, they changed together with the environment. The fact that we see ourselves not in-relation-with, sets boundaries to our understanding and perception of the natural world which ultimately leads to disconnection, and allows us to abuse it.
The quiet practice of attention grew into Fieldwork Fictioning, a design methodology that explores biodiversity, and the set of relations it creates, as something sensed, embodied, and imagined, and not only measured.
- Fieldwork Fictioning treats biodiversity as a form of relational intelligence. It understands ecosystems as networks, where each organism, each element, is constantly in relation with others. The project asks: how can design help us perceive these relations? How can it train us to recognise complexity, care, and reciprocity rather than separation?
- Fictioning opens a space for imagination and empathy. It allows ecological facts to coexist with subjective perception, producing what I call situated speculation: creative interpretations of the living world that remain grounded in the real.
- Fieldwork Fictioning becomes both process and outcome, a living methodology and a body of work. Its artefacts include the Fieldwork Fiction Cards, a set of field prompts that guide perception through sight, touch, sound, smell, and breath; and The Fieldwork Fiction Files, a living archive where sensory records, data, and poetic fragments coexist. Together, they form a system of design tools for noticing.
Working in Kilchoan, on the Scottish west coast, I came to understand that restoration can be also perceptual. Restoring biodiversity implies restoring our capacity to sense. I began to think of biodiversity not as a static count of species but as the intelligence of relationships. As diversity increases, so does the system’s ability to adapt, communicate, and evolve. Can that be true also for us? Do we need to perceive better to understand this intelligence?
As Vandana Shiva writes, “The monoculture of the mind is blind to biodiversity; it looks at the world through uniformity.”Fieldwork Fictioning is an attempt to challenge that monoculture through design. It asks: how might design cultivate more plural, sensitive, and embodied ways of knowing? How might it become a practice of attention, rather than production?
The project uses design not to represent nature but to participate in it. Each iteration becomes a prototype of perception: a way to train awareness, to feel the edges and the subtleness of ecological systems. The Files collect these acts as maps, patterns, and reflections creating an archive of how life is perceived and restored through design.
Knowledge, in this sense, is not only intellectual. It is embodied, lived, and situated. I believe that knowledge without embodiment cannot become wisdom. Through sensory engagement and imaginative translation, Fieldwork Fictioning activates tacit forms of knowing, the kind that arise from being in relation.
By combining empirical field methods with fiction, the project creates a bridge between science and imagination, ecology and design. It invites people to perceive biodiversity as something that includes them, they are the creators of new relationships. Ultimately, Fieldwork Fictioning proposes design as a form of ecological literacy. It tries to relate ecological realities to sense-making. By cultivating empathy, and understanding complexity, it seeks to restore our relationships with the environment so ultimately we don’t repeat in the same mistakes.