Project Team: Liz Edwards, Serena Pollastri
Year: 2023
SaMPaS (Salt Marsh Participatory Sensing) is a design-led project for community engagement in salt marsh monitoring and planning regeneration projects. The project toolkit includes technologies for documenting salt marsh features and salt marsh use. It also includes digital mapping software to display data collected by project participants.
These tools have been designed to support the work of Our Future Coast, particularly at Hest Bank and Jenny Brown’s point in Morecambe Bay. This programme of activities is intended to improve the resilience of local communities to flood risk and coastal erosion by encouraging salt marsh regeneration. Our Future Coast is inviting the community to help in the process of designing more ecologically sound and sustainable flood resilience techniques as opposed to hard concrete structures that are expensive and carbon-intensive to build and maintain.
The SaMPaS tool kit can be used for benchmarking the ecological condition of a site prior to interventions and as the new techniques are implemented to compare the success of different approaches. It can use used to record how people use salt marsh areas and the values they associate with different sites. It could also be used to map desired futures for particular locations.
The design process in SaMPaS was informed by an initial deep dive with coastal researchers and practitioners, as well as the local government and environmental organisations. This was essential for the team to fully understand the type of data associated with saltmarsh processes and how such data is gathered, stored, and analysed.
Initial iterations for the toolkit were then tested with community groups.
SaMPaS was funded by the Future Observatory of the Design Museum through their Design Exchange Partnership programme (AHRC). Sampas was part of the Coastal Community programme in 2023. See all the projects at this link: https://futureobservatory.org/research/strands/design-exchange-partnerships/coastal-communities-2023