DredgeFest: Social Experiments in Sedimentary Landscapes

This paper provides a critical account of ‘DredgeFest’, a series of design events conceptualized and produced by the Dredge Research Collaborative. DredgeFest is an interdisciplinary and public event series consisting of symposia, exhibitions, landscape tours, and design workshops, all of which are deployed to investigate the anthropogenic design and manipulation of sedimentary processes. This manipulation, performed in large part by the “dredging industry”, which we construe broadly to include dredge operators, materials manufacturers, environmental consultancies, engineering firms, and government agencies, is extraordinarily extensive. Correspondingly, interest in its design potential has recently grown within design disciplines, yet agency in this sedimentary field has thus far generally eluded designers of the built environment.DredgeFest is an effort to address these disconnections between designers and industry. The social intent of these events is to provide a novel and generative forum that draws together designers, corporate practitioners, industry suppliers, academics, federal and state agencies, scientists, activists and the general public to share expertise and discuss challenges related to dredging and other sedimentary manipulations. Conceived as a four part series examining North America’s four coasts, two of these events have been completed (DredgeFest New York and DredgeFest Louisiana) while DredgeFest Great Lakes and DredgeFest California will occur within the next two years. Situated at the midpoint of this multi-year research project, this paper documents the intentions and actualized activities of these events, as well as what they have achieved or not yet achieved with respect to creating a space for active experimentation in real world contexts of environmental design, planning and engineering. Additionally, this paper provides a provisional set of lessons learned through the DredgeFest event series which may be broadly applicable to efforts to link design and industry.

Volume Editors
David Ruy & Lola Sheppard

ISBN
978-0-935502-95-4