Your city/landscape/environment is a stakeholder, let it speak

Abstract

How to harvest language from the world around you.

“If eskimos have so many words for snow, it’s because they have turned snow into a resource” – Donella Meadows. This experiential outdoor workshop teaches you to ‘listen’ to your environment and harvest precise, contextual language. Clear language is your resource.

Too often, language is invented in boardrooms and abstracted from reality. By harvesting language from the world around us, we could treat it as a stakeholder with particular needs. This workshop demonstrates how design goes deeper when we listen attentively to real places, their ecosystems, history and nature. 

By the end of the session you can take this technique back to your work. In a world of increasing abstraction and complexity, we can get a foothold when we go back to language rooted in place.

About

Elle de Vries | Content Strategist and Brand Language Specialist

Ellen de Vries is a content strategist and brand language specialist. For over 15 years she’s been helping organisations centre on authentic language to design systems and services that are fit for purpose. 

She’s worked with large charities, arts organisations, government departments and brands like English Heritage and The Ethical Tea Partnership. Alongside her role at Mid Sussex County Council, recent collaborations include work with a local farming community, a local circular economy project, and a reforestation programme in the Congo basin. 

Ellen’s practice sees language as a living resource, a fundamental meeting point between humans and their environment. All too often it is abstracted to the point where it is no longer clear enough to work with. 

She studied with the School of Systems Change in 2024 and is now discovering ways to bring her work to support communities as they find their language strategies for regeneration and resilience.