An Embodied Exhibition to Experience Empowerment
I'm a sustainability scientist and transformative experience designer turned electrical engineer and integrative philosopher, currently researching and lecturing at Imperial College London whilst pursuing masters studies at Uppsala University and working as a private educator.
My background spans transformative education and human collaboration research, learning experience design and facilitation, electrical engineering, software systems, and sustainability sciences. Through designing and facilitating countless educational programmes, workshops, and seminars as a student activist, changemaker, and Imperial College employee, I discovered a fundamental limitation: compartmentalised educational interventions fade over time—people drift back to habitual patterns of operating. For five years, I've action-researched: "What does it take to design truly empowering educational experiences?" While discovering fascinating insights—like the significance of facilitators' inner conditions for holding transformative spaces—I remained stumped by intervention duration limits.
After a breakthrough moment with CERN IdeaSquare embodied innovation faciliators, I began to seek how architectural features experientially and empirically modulate our attention, facilitate thinking, and influence human capacity expression. Through extensive literature review, interviews, global surveys, and self-examination, I've found physical environments may be one of the most underrated factor in empowering humans to address our complex, interconnected global challenges.
I've presented my research at Imperial College Teaching and Learning Festival 2024, Degrowth Conferences 2024-2025, Oxford ESPRIT Workshop 2025, and London Student Sustainability Conferences 2023-2025. As founder of the Imperial+ sustainability collective, I organised Imperial's first-ever Sustainability Retreat Day, bringing together over 100 staff and students with lasting outcomes.
How may physical environments empower individuals and collectives with agency, energy, and skills to act pro-socially and pro-environmentally? I propose designing a highly interactive exhibition space exploring tensions between disempowering and empowering environments whilst establishing this emerging field through real-time visitor modification and feedback.
Context & Development: My research spanning environmental psychology, transformative learning theory, neuroscience, and architectural theory revealed empowering environments share three features: they engage all bodily senses, facilitate attention restoration, and activate embodied human capacities—creativity, compassion, courage. This emerged from recognising that educational interventions fade when people return to disempowering everyday environments.
Critical Engagement: This addresses the environmental crisis's psychological dimensions—the gap between knowing what needs doing and actually doing it. Rather than high-tech solutions requiring bureaucratic systems, this proposal uses accessible, low-cost interventions with potential to fundamentally reshape lived experience and activate innate human goodness.
Spatial Culture Impact: The exhibition engages visitor-inhabitants with "how" they may create empowering environments themselves, putting research into practice. By consciously designing living spaces—homes, workplaces, transport habitats—we create conditions where pro-environmental action becomes inevitable rather than effortful.
Future Evolution: This foundations work aims toward developing a toolkit and experiential learning journey for designing empowering everyday physical environments—launching as Climate Fresk-style workshops and certification scheme: "Designing Empowering (Physical) Spaces." The proposal demonstrates values of accessibility, embodied wisdom, and systemic change through environmental intervention.