Over the Jubilee holiday, 2-3 June 2022, visitors to the Scottish Crannog Centre had the opportunity to take part in an exciting new project: The RoundView. 

Image from The RoundView game depicting letters, industries and the environment

The RoundView is a big-picture, positive vision of sustainability that can inspire action. It sets out a clear, simple set of positive guidelines based on the opposites of the root causes of environmental damage. Underpinned by the research of Joanne Tippet and Fraser How from the University of Manchester, The RoundView highlights the global and local impact of climate change and inspires a call to action.  

Visitors were invited to play a series of games which have been tailored to tell a local story of sustainability linked to the global story of the Earth. The games are designed as large-scale puzzles and are fun and tactile. The RoundView is for everyone from school children to family groups and adult visitors alike. Once fitted together, the pieces of these puzzles give key information that builds up visitors’ understanding of sustainability, without requiring a formal workshop facilitator or a teacher.  

This project offers a powerful opportunity to interpret our heritage in new ways, and will inspire action towards a sustainable future! 

Members of the UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration Through Languages and the Arts team were also present to document the takeover and to hold information sessions, short workshop activities and discussions with Visitors throughout both days. 

Watch the video and listen to the podcast episode below, to get a better sense of what happened on the day and what the RoundView is all about. 

About Jo Tippet  

Dr Joanne Tippett is a lecturer in Spatial Planning in the School of Environment and Development at the University of Manchester. Joanne began working in the field of community participation in ecological planning in 1993, working with rural communities in Southern Africa. Her ESRC funded research into participatory river basin planning led to the development of a hands-on toolkit for engagement, Ketso. Ketso is now a social business, and the kit has been used in over 75 countries and half the universities in the UK. You can find out more at Ketso.com.

Joanne was a finalist in the 2014 Praxis Unico Impact Awards and Ketso was commended by the Royal Town Planning Institute North West for ‘positive contribution to community engagement’ in 2013. She has published in the area of the social implications of building flood resilience from research funded by the EU Seventh Framework Programme. Action research funded by the Sustainable Consumption Institute and 250 staff in Tesco led to the creation of the RoundView Tool for Sustainability. The RoundView provides the conceptual framing for the Carbon Landscape, a £3.2 million, 5-year Heritage Lottery funded project, and Dr. Tippett is leading on the innovative community engagement for this multi-stakeholder project aiming to restore post-industrial landscapes and increase their ecological resilience in the face of climate change. Her work was short-listed for the UK Sustainable Development Commissions Breakthrough Ideas for the 21st Century. 

About the RoundView

The RoundView is an open framework that helps us imagine and create a sustainable future. The RoundView Guidelines have emerged from Dr. Joanne Tippett’s research at The University of Manchester (funded by the ESRC and Sustainable Consumption Institute), and provide us with a positive vision to inform our decision-making. They give us a clear direction to work towards, clarifying the problems of our current direction, or ‘business as usual’. The RoundView uses innovative hands-on tools to communicate environmental ideas in an accessible, easily understandable way. Read more about the project at https://www.roundview.org/

About the Scottish Crannog Centre

The Scottish Crannog Centre is an iron age museum in Kinross, Central Scotland. They aim to be a sector-defining museum: a museum that is democratic, engages diverse people (both those that work alongside each other and those that visit), and a place of activism where leadership runs right through the organisation. More information is available at https://crannog.co.uk/ 

First published: 7 September 2022

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