Summary

The shore and the sea, are areas for which Britain is well known. However, who owns the sea? What can an individual or community use the sea for other than visits and tourism? How does the sea, and its applications, look in the future? This report details the research, considerations, design, prototyping and testing around future uses of the sea. This work has been generated in response to a brief set by Goldsmiths University to challenge a public body. We chose the Crown Estate as a starting point for research. In order to fully understand the subject matter, available routes for design and potential communities and locations for engagement we began with researching the subject broadly collecting a variety of information.

We compiled the information into a workbook for review and feedback; inspired ourselves from related projects and other designer’s work; designed and produced a number of prototypes and ran a small workshop designed to involve relevant stakeholders that we identified. This project aims to perform design research that employs strategies and work outputs that attempt to strike a balance between empirical and speculative fields of design and challenge the remit of our selected public body. This brief permits us to expand upon our understanding of research and design considerations, but also, practically improve and diversify our creative and crafting skills for the purposes of synthesising our design outcomes.