Celebrate World Earth Day at Winchester School of Art
21st—22nd April 2026
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Radical Earth: Incubator for Utopian Publishing.
World Earth Day, Design Dialogues.
Hosted by Winchester School of Art’s Design department, this free event fosters progressive, utopian dreaming in a circular space mirroring earth’s cycles.
This event will be an immersive in-person at Winchester School of Art’s World Earth Day event (21–22 April), held in the Rotunda, Graphic studios, and LTA.
Join us for talks and workshops featuring Robin de Carteret’s Deep Time walk (systemsgames.org.uk) & System Thinking, Rob Hopkins’ Time Machine workshop (robhopkins.net), and Åbäke’s World Earth Night & Alternative Realities—harnessing radical design thinking, experimental publishing under Publishing Futures: Temporal Ecologies, and generous systems for solidarity-driven healing and reimagining sustainable ways of living. Each strand explores speculative design, climate, systems, regenerative futures, and creative approaches to navigating complexity.
Schedule
Tuesday 21st April
13.00–17.00:
Workshop 1 (60 places)
Deep Time Walk (4.6 km)
Facilitator Robin de Carteret
Duration: Approx 4 hours
Venue: Meet at Winchester Cathedral main entrance.
What Three Words: ///paddlers.clinking.lawful
A 4.6 km embodied journey through Earth’s 4.6-billion-year history. The walk includes storytelling, scientific explanation, reflective pauses, and short interactive activities illustrating emergence, planetary scale self-organisation, and newly discovered evolutionary processes. The full-length format creates a profound perspective on scale and on the recency of human impacts.
17.30–21.00:
Part 1 of Workshop 2 (12 places)
World Earth Night-Zine: Nocturnal Worlds
Facilitator: Åbäke
Duration: Approx 6 hours plus extra independent work
Venue: 3025 MA Design Studio
Interactive night-time activities flip diurnal norms, exploring nocturnal rhythms through discussion, cooking, making, and zine assembly under dim lights. Embodied experiences draw from kiwi birds, bats, vampires to imagine upside-down worlds spilling into ours, fuelling risograph and screen-printed Night-Zines. Exceptionally open printing workshops throughout darkness empower design students with experimental publishing skills, ready for dawn presentation.
Wednesday 22nd April
TALKS / MAIN DAY in Lecture theatre A (LTA westside)
09.00–09.30: Coffee/tea welcome.
09.30–9.35: Intro to Radical Earth & Design Dialogues Danny Aldred.
09.35–10.00: Robin de Carteret
10.00–10.25: Maki (Åbäke)
10.25–10.50: Rob Hopkins
11.00–11.25: Eileen White
11.25–11.50: James Langedon
07.00–09.00:
Part 2 of Workshop 2 (12 places)
World Earth Night-Zine: Nocturnal Worlds.
Facilitator: Åbäke
Duration: Approx 6 hours plus extra independent work
Venue: 3025 MA Design Studio
Interactive night-time activities flip diurnal norms, exploring nocturnal rhythms through discussion, cooking, making, and zine assembly under dim lights. Embodied experiences draw from kiwi birds, bats, vampires to imagine upside-down worlds spilling into ours, fuelling risograph and screen-printed Night-Zines. Exceptionally open printing workshops throughout darkness empower design students with experimental publishing skills, ready for dawn presentation.
13.00–15.30
Workshop 3 (15 places)
Sustainable Thinking, Experimental Photography Workshop.
Facilitator: Eileen White
Duration: Approx 2.5 hours
Venue: Meet outside the Eastside Rotunda
We invite you to participate in a collaborative creative process in response to the landscape around you in this experimental photography workshop. ‘Chemi-Lumen’ printing is a beautiful and low-toxic way to create abstract photographic images using darkroom processes, however, without a camera or a darkroom. We will make our own alternative chemistry from foraged plant matter and work with sunlight, directly responding to seasonal plant life and weather conditions on the day, thereby embedding the ecology of the site into the work.
13.00–16.00:
Workshop 4 (60 places)
Power of Positive Tipping Points / Systems Games Workshop.
Facilitator: Robin de Carteret
Duration: Approx 3 hours
Venue: Westside Lecture Theatre (WSLT westside)
Interactive group games illustrate reinforcing and balancing feedback loops, emergence, network ejects, and tipping points. These embodied experiences are connected to climate and earth-system tipping points, as well as positive social tipping points needed to accelerate renewable energy, regenerative agriculture, plant-based eating, active travel, and cultural shifts.
13.00–17.00:
Workshop 5 (50 places)
Time Machine >> Speculative living.
Facilitator Rob Hopkins
Duration: Approx 5 hours
Venue: Eastside Rotunda
Interactive group exercises activate time travel to a thriving future, using sensory immersion, ‘Yes, And’ improvisation, ‘What If’ brainstorming, and Ridiculous Ideas challenges. These embodied experiences connect participants to positive futures we want to see, renewable energy transitions, regenerative local economies, and cultural shifts toward imagination-led activism. In the Rotunda studio, we prepare design students to carry forward empowering visions from 2035, fostering optimism, bold creativity, and actionable prototypes for real-world change.
14.00–15.00:
Workshop 6 (12 places)
World Making: Mapping Winchester’s Living Memory
Facilitator Rui Cai & Georgia Perkins
Duration: Approx 1 hour
Venue: Mac Room 01. 2085
We invite you to participate in a collective act of “world-making.  Traditional maps offer a detached, bird’s-eye view of Winchester’s streets and buildings, but they often erase the living, breathing ecology of the city. In this session, we will transform a shared digital canvas on Felt.com into a rich, interactive map of our entangled environment. Whether you are a student mapping a fleeting encounter with a campus squirrel this morning, or a local resident uploading a cherished memory of an old oak tree from decades ago, your perspective is vital. We encourage a creative, speculative writing style: instead of simply describing a place from the outside, try writing from the perspective of the non-human. Give voice to the chalk streams, the ancient roots, the wind, or the wildlife. By pinning your poetry, prose, and sensory memories to this collaborative platform, we are building a “situated” archive. Together, we will overlay
Winchester’s concrete grid with a vibrant, multigenerational tapestry of nature and culture. Please grab a device, open the map, and let’s begin world-making.
Exhibitions
Onsite exhibition by Eileen White showcases plant and organ forms using plant-based photography alongside Abfall’s paste-up trees. MACD students create pop events and happenings across the days, weaving radical helping with design practices.