“Our eyes do not divide us from the world, but they unite us to it. Let this be known to be true. Let us abandon the simplicity of separation and give unity its due. Let us abandon the self-mutilation which has been our way and give expression to the potential harmony of human-nature” — Ian McHarg, Design with Nature

✋ Multi-Session 🥰 Ages 8+ 🕐 1.5–2 Hours 👩‍👦‍👦 up to 15 Participants 🍎 1–2 Facilitators 🎨 Craft Materials

In this workshop, we'll notice how to highlight biotic (living) and abiotic (nonliving) factors as the key actors in the urban environment. By tracking how these environmental components interact—as well as how they are related—you can more deeply understand unique ecologies in your local community.

Suggested Timing: 40 minutes

We suggest setting your room up with workspaces for small groups of 2–3 participants. Each workspace should have one large sheet of paper with a biotic-abiotic Venn diagram drawing, one sheet of large paper with a biotic-abiotic spectrum drawing, pens and pencils, and ~9–12 samples for sorting.

Getting Started (10 minutes) When participants first arrive, hand out copies of the Sorting and Collecting zine and make sure everyone has their field journal. Encourage participants to pair up and spend 5 minutes looking through the zine. They should discuss with their partner any questions or observations they might have. Next, using the zine as a jumping-off point, spend another 5 minutes as a full group discussing the concepts of biotic and abiotic components of urban ecosystems and what forms these factors take (living things, objects, and processes).

Small Group Exploration 1, Biotic-Abiotic Venn Diagram (15 minutes) Begin by having participants work in their small groups of two to three to sort their samples into the Venn diagram categories of biotic, abiotic, or something in-between (things that are “hard to place,” or not obviously living or nonliving). The participants might find that some objects are easier to place than others: over time, some materials may transform from biotic components to abiotic ones. For example, leaves are biotic when living and attached to trees, but become abiotic when they fall off, die, and decompose.

Spend the last 5 minutes having participants take a quick look at how other groups sorted the objects, then facilitate a discussion around some of the following questions:

Small Group Exploration 2, Biotic-Abiotic Spectrum (15 minutes) Ask participants to do an alternate sort, this time placing objects along the spectrum of biotic to abiotic. This activity will likely go a bit quicker than the first sort, since your participants will be working with the same set of materials. After about 5 minutes or so, have a discussion similar to that for the first sort:

Remind participants to keep the answers to these discussions in mind during the field exercise. Encourage patrons to think about what parts of the environment are living and nonliving, and how they are interacting.

Suggested Timing: 40 minutes

For this field exercise, participants will visit two to three field sites, differing in the type of vegetation they have (e.g., a basketball court next to a construction site and a landscaped courtyard). At each site, participants will document or collect at least five found objects (biotic or abiotic) that they will then use to create their own custom sort to represent your neighborhood's ecosystem.

We recommend having your group divide up into teams of two or three. Each team gets a bin for storing collected items. Make sure participants bring their field journals with them to record observations of the types of life found at each field site that they might not be able to physically collect. As a facilitator, you may also want to have a camera (and mobile photo printer, if you have one!) for snapping some photos along the way.

The goal of this exercise is to extend our senses-based observations of urban ecosystems through thoughtful connection with the objects, entities, processes, and most importantly, life, they hold. Participants will collect data in their field journals and will collect physical objects from the ecosystem. Field documentation is a vital skill for capturing the portrait of a landscape and its unique environmental features.

Remember, this workshop's Sorting and Collecting zine outlines different ways of collecting in the urban ecosystem: see how many different forms of documentation the participants can collect in the field. While outside, discuss the idea of generating a shared collection of objects that represent your neighborhood's ecosystem. Have groups think about the scale of their collection—are they capturing several meters? The whole field-site? A single square centimeter? Probe them about what types of documentation and collection are necessary to accurately capture the location and its ecology.

Suggested Timing: 40 minutes (30min for the activity + 10min for clean-up & hand-washing)

For the come-together activity, we recommend staying outside (weather permitting!). Working in their small groups, participants will create a ‘taxonomy’ or ‘phylogeny’ of their found objects—essentially, an arrangement or categorization of their objects in a way that the group decides on together. The biotic-abiotic Venn diagram and spectrum from the introductory activity are just two ways that you might make a sort, but there are so many more! Encourage your participants to be creative. We recommend giving each group a large sheep of paper to serve as the backdrop for their sorts. Objects might be sorted by color, by structure, by size and shape: any arrangement which aids in the observer identifying relationships (specifically similarities and differences) between objects. If there are multiple ideas, try arranging the objects in several different ways!

Gallery Walk & Discussion: Once each group has completed their custom sort (this should take ~20 minutes), do a "gallery walk" as a full-group to observe the many ways in which objects from the same landscape can be categorized differently. Let each small group explain their sort and what was most interesting about making it. Then, discuss some of the following questions: