Garden Diary

Objectar el Món was an event held within Barcelona Design Week 2019, focused on the role of designers in rethinking ways of coexistence between human and non-human forms of life, with the aim of making their (and our) survival possible.

Banzai Turbo and Berta Sala invited product design professionals to contribute an object they believed met the material, functional, methodological, consumption, or production criteria necessary to halt environmental destruction—or even to initiate processes of ecological restoration.

“What is an object that meets the material, functional, methodological, consumption or production characteristics needed in order to cease the destruction of the environment, or even initiate processes to restore it?”

If the climate crisis is driven by overconsumption, the response must be to produce and acquire less, while fostering richer forms of experience. If lack of awareness stands in the way of change, learning must become deeper and more intentional. Design, then, may need to expand beyond the object toward a broader framework: object, relation, and integration.

A garden is a designed natural space, a life cycle at a small scale, and restorative by definition—for both the environment and the people who use it. Making a garden becomes a transformative learning journey, documented through a seven-year visual journal and collage practice, in which Jeannette reflects on how gardening reshaped her relationship with nature.

Caring for a garden unfolds many forms of learning, from the initial project and its imagined possibilities to an understanding of plants, water, soil, animals, and climate. This process inevitably leads to broader questions of ethics, politics, food, and energy, reshaping both awareness and the idea of what a “beautiful garden” can be.