Ocean Futures

how can we “know” the ocean otherwise?

The Ocean Futures series explores how speculative methods can work alongside citizen science to build ocean futures literacies. By combining scientific knowledge with imagination, the project supports communities in developing alternative visions of ocean futures by thinking critically about the environmental challenges facing marine ecosystems. Across a series of public-facing activities, experiments, and installations, the research moves beyond data collection as the primary way of knowing, inviting participants through workshops and facilitated public interventions to question how knowledge leads to care and action, and how more collective, relational forms of environmental stewardship might emerge.

Publications

Gillian Russell, Lauren Thu, Jihyun Park, and Katherine Reilly. 2025. Designing Ocean Futures Literacies: Reimagining the shoreline cleanup as a tool for ‘amphibious thinking’. In Companion Publication of the 2025 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’25 Companion). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 20–22. https://doi.org/10.1145/3715668.3734161

Katherine Reilly, Gillian Russell, Lauren Thu, and Jihyun Park. 2025. Situated Design and False Creek Futures: Relationality Engagement and Creativity in Eco-social Information Systems. In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 944–958. https://doi.org/10.1145/3715336.3735835

News

Assistant professor Gillian Russell awarded grant to support Ocean Futures project

This project is led by the Imaginative Methods Lab at SFU
Graphic Design by Jihyun Park