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Footer Text © M. Urban 2018


Watching Dogs Dream

Projects of M. Urban

Design Research
Towards a Dissertation in Transition Design




Framebreakers: A Speculative Future







Designers & Forests: Projects

Beetle Kill

Explore Reflect Respond

Hidden Frontiers

Gathering Forests and Community

Neskaupkóda




Design Ephemera
Burned Over Atlas

Burned Over Poster Exchange

Marion Art Gallery

Kitaab Book

 

Examples of student work

 

 




© M. Urban 2023




Footer Text © M. Urban 2018


Watching Dogs Dream

Projects of M. Urban

Over the past few decades, the discipline of design has evolved to address
systems and behaviors and to consider problems decades or centuries from now.
This approach uses designed artifacts to help the viewer imagine a possible
future state and help them decide if it is a reality they want to realize or
avoid.

The Framebreakers

is a work of

speculative
futuring.



The Framebreakers exist in a possible future for Western New York. They are
inspired by the region's potential, imagining a time when our children or future
selves take advantage of the materials, structures, or land that lie abandoned
with the rusting of the Steel Belt. What if we reused, repurposed, or rebuilt in
response to rising prices and increasing scarcity? What if we returned to
community-based self-sufficiency?

© M. Urban 2023




Footer Text © M. Urban 2018


Watching Dogs Dream

Projects of M. Urban

Designers & Forests

 

 

Designers and Forests began after a 2012 research trip to Iceland. While there I
teamed up with Daniel Byström to launch an effort to teach young designers to
think beyond products and theoretical solutions, finding meaning from the
ecosystems that surround their communities.

 

 

 










Through workshops, projects, and research efforts Designers and Forests has
introduced dozens of students to contemporary efforts of sustainable forestry,
and conversely foresters to the value of design.

 

These workshops are highlighted on the following pages and include: Beetle Kill
and Aspen Die-Off, Hidden Frontiers, Explore Reflect Respond, Gathering Forests
and Community, and Neskaupkóda.

© M. Urban 2023




Footer Text © M. Urban 2018


Watching Dogs Dream

Projects of M. Urban

Beetle Kill Story Blanket


 

 



Story Blanket (Detail)

The inspiration for this piece came from a handwoven nineteenth-century blanket
found in the Mormon History Museum in Salt Lake City, Utah. I drew from the
nature of the blanket as an object of daily use, often passed down within a
family, connecting the generations. It is intended as a way to convey the story
of forest use in the state to illustrate the factors that have shaped it.




In Utah, much of the land is owned by the state and federal government and
administered by a patchwork of different agencies. Private entities often least
this forest allotments for grazing sheep or, more recently, cattle.

 

The sheep here are sheared or full. Or black and white, with the “black sheep” a
subtle nod to those family members who have left the state’s dominant Mormon
faith. In their midst is the “all seeing eye” found on currency from the
mid-nineteenth century, minted by the Mormon government of Utah before it joined
with the United States.



The Mountain Pine Beetle is devastating the forests of the Inter-Mountain West
and Pacific Northwest. Mountainsides are brown, covered with bare tree trunks,
and the ecology is rapidly changing. However, for all this devastation, the
Mountain Pine Beetle is not an invasive species. Trees were able to withstand
the beetle because hatches would occur every other year, allowing them time to
recover. With increasingly warm winters, the beetles' life cycle has changed,
and it is now hatching every year or even twice a year, overwhelming the trees'
defenses.

 

Bees have developed a symbiotic relationship with these beetles. Of the 900
species of bees native to Utah, the majority are solitary nesting in the
chambers left behind by wood-boring beetles such as the Mountain Pine Beetle.
According to Mormonism, the bee and the beehive represent industry and
cooperation and are seen all over the state. In the midst of the bees and
beetles is the new industry of Utah—oil. Oil and gas development has rapidly
increased with leases for access to public land offered by the federal and state
government.



In the mid-nineteenth century, immigrants streamed into the United States,
across the Great Plains and over the Rockies to Utah. Most of these newly
converted Mormons were poor, some unable to afford a horse and wagon for their
belongings. These families loaded up handcarts that they pulled themselves
across the prairies and mountains.

 

Today, the descendants of these pioneers live in large houses with three and
four bay garages. They commute to work on packed highways and out again on the
weekends in search of open spaces. The natural temperature inversions of the
mountains combine with the vehicle exhaust to the create heavy smog over Salt
Lake City, Logan, and the other rapidly growing urban and suburban areas of the
state.




Memento Arboribus

Each of the species represented in this blanket is under intense pressure from
invasive or unbalanced forces; the Englemann Spruce and the Lodgepole Pine are
the center of the design are susceptible to the infestation of the Mountain Pine
Beetle. Quaking Aspen is represented by their heart-shaped leaves. Groves of
this clonal and interconnected tree and are dying suddenly, afflicted by Sudden
Aspen Decline. The Green Ash, represented by its pinnately compound leaves, was
recently placed on the red list of species on the brink of extinction by
International Union for Conservation of Nature. The Emerald Ash Borer is
decimating this foundational species in Eastern Hardwood Forests and will
radically change the face of these ecosystems.

© M. Urban 2023




Footer Text © M. Urban 2018


Watching Dogs Dream

Projects of M. Urban

Explore Reflect Respond

 

 









Program and Worksheet | 2014 | Print | 11" by 17"

The Explore. Reflect. Respond. workshop and exhibition were held as part of
Design March 2014 in Reykjavik, Iceland. Designers&Forests organized both, with
the assistance of MAKE by Þorpið.

 

During the workshop, speakers shared their experiences incommunity-based design
practices in Iceland, Sweden, England, and the UnitedStates. I compiled essays
and interviews on the nature of design, collaboration, and community-based
design. I also interviewed Paul C. Rogers of Utah State University and the
Western Aspen Alliance on what ecology and ecosystems can teach us about
collaboration and interconnectedness.


 

The center spread of the tabloid acts as a worksheet to prompt reflection on
resources within communities and to help residents envision the future of their
towns. The intent is for the document to facilitate. Workshop participants used
it during the breakout sessions and were encouraged to take additional copies to
continue the dialogue in their hometowns.

 

Design decisions were the result of a tight budget. The document itself is
two-color and printed in the off-hours at the local newspaper. The colors were
chosen from the spot inks the press happened to have on hand.

 

The associated exhibition at Reykjavik 871±2 highlighted some of the outcomes of
Beetle Kill and Aspen Die-off as well as the work of MAKE by Þorpið, a project
that inspired Designers&Forests, and that of Epicenter, an organization that our
group had visited.

 



Speakers included:

Lára Vilberfsdóttir, Iceland.MAKE by Þorpið

Daniel Byström, Sweden. DesignNation and Designers&Forests

Maria Sykes, United States.Epicenter

Pete Collard, United Kingdom,and Karna Sigurðardóttir, Iceland. Designs from
Nowhere

 

 



EFFERENTION

 

 






Efferention | Publication and Exhibition | Senior Collaborative Project

Maribel Avila, Alison Dyer, Kayleigh Forger, Athena Kolokotronis, Anne Leue, Jon
McCray, Jessica Wilcox




Effrention was a central element of the exhibition, researched and designed by
seven students from the State University of New York at Fredonia as part of a
senior design course. A list of factors and stakeholders shaping resource use in
Utah as defined by the participants in 2013 research trip were presented to the
Fredonia student. I worked with the class to organize the factors into four
over-arching concepts affecting the forests of Utah. The students produced
research papers and also skyped with their Swedish counterparts. They edited
their findings to create a document that functions as a publication and an
informational exhibit when unfolded and hung. This dual format was the solution
to the limitations of shipping and set-up time. Additionally, the document was
printed by the local newspaper press in a mixture or CMYK, duotone, and single
inks to make the most of a limited budget. In addition the exhibition
presentation, it was distributed at many official festival locations at Design
March 2014 in Reykjavik, Iceland.

 

Efferention was recognized in 2015 by the American Advertising Federation with a
gold medal from AAF Buffalo, a gold medal and Judges Award of Excellence from 
AAF region 2 and a silver medal from the AAF national competition.

© M. Urban 2023




Footer Text © M. Urban 2018


Watching Dogs Dream

Projects of M. Urban

Hidden Frontiers


 

 



Hidden Frontiers Call For Entries Graphic | 2015 | Poster and Visual
Representation of Research | Dimensions Variable | Chalk Illustration with
Digital Painting

The Hidden Frontiers installment of Designers & Forests began through defining a
conceptual framework to study the region of Central and Western New York. Over
the course of American history is an area that has been called the American
frontier, the Steel Belt, the Rust Belt, and the Burned Over District.




The Burned Over District is a term used by historians, sociologists, and sundry
others, to describe the area of Central and Western New York scorched with the
fire of social reform and millennial fear from the late 18th to the mid 19th
centuries. It was the birthplace of an unusually high number of secular and
religious utopian movements—movements that sought to redefine the ways humans
interact with each other and with their environments.




During the preparation for the workshop, I was captivated by an 1876 Currier and
Ives print, Friendship Love and Truth, found in the United States Library of
Congress and this inspired the Hidden Frontiers call for entries poster. The
inspiration is formal, but it also influenced the use of symbolism hidden in the
illustration. The final piece is a mix of stories, experiences, history, and
ecology. It is a statement of our inspiration and beliefs. The graphic was used
as a printed poster and as the interactive graphic.

 



© M. Urban 2023













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