Aquatic Ecologist Scout Pack

Aquatic Ecologist Scout Pack is an educational introductory pack for young Scouts that adds ocean-related activities and badges to their Scout manifesto.

Year: 2024

Design: Daisy McClay, Hongyu Wu, Vishal Mehta, Xiaozhuo Jiang & Xiaotong Liu

Discipline: Human Centred Design, Co-design, Citizen Science, Education

My contributions include project management, stakeholder research, graphic design, screen printing, and curation.

Project designed as part of MA/MSc Innovation Design Engineering | Royal College of Art & Imperial College London

Cities and oceans have never been more connected than before. With rising sea levels, London will soon be underwater or transformed into a coastal city. The Aquatic Ecologist Scout Pack serves as an introduction to prepare young children for this crucial future by adding more ocean-related activities and badges to their Scout manifesto to enhance ocean literacy, foster a sense of ownership, and provide valuable education.

Through observations & engagement with the residents of the London borough of Kingston-upon-Thames, the lack of and importance of education was identified as a key to change and to bring residents closer to the oceans.

In response, we designed the Aquatic Ecologist Scout Pack. In collaboration with the 1st Kingston Hill Scout Group—one of the oldest groups in the Scout movement—we built an immersive, scalable solution that serves as an introduction to prepare young children for strengthening the connection between oceans and cities.

The pack contains a notebook for observations, activity cards for participation, badges for reward and a ocean inspired scarf with a woggle.

Using the pedagogic models offered by the scouts, we designed the activity cards and the various items in the box. We used 3D printing, embroidery, textile screen printing and different methods of printing to realise the contents of the box.

The Aquatic Ecology Scout Pack was a finalist in the 2024 RCA Grand Challenge competition, which featured over 130 teams designing solutions to address the impacts of London on the ocean environment. The pack also received special commendation for ‘Participatory Mapping’.

The Aquatic Ecology Scout Pack was also exhibited at UNESCO 2024 Ocean Decade Conference in the Museum of Natural Sciences in Barcelona, as seen below.

Aquatic Ecologist Scout Pack

Through observations & engagement with the residents of the London borough of Kingston-upon-Thames, the lack of and importance of education was identified as a key to change and to bring residents closer to the oceans.

Using the pedagogic models offered by the scouts, we designed the activity cards and the various items in the box. We used 3D printing, embroidery, textile screen printing and different methods of printing to realise the contents of the box.

The Aquatic Ecology Scout Pack was a finalist in the 2024 RCA Grand Challenge competition, which featured over 130 teams designing solutions to address the impacts of London on the ocean environment. The pack also received special commendation for ‘Participatory Mapping’.

The Aquatic Ecology Scout Pack was also exhibited at UNESCO 2024 Ocean Decade Conference in the Museum of Natural Sciences in Barcelona, as seen below.

VISHAL MEHTA