Earth Week workshop: Turning e-waste into tools for urban gardens

This piece is written by Heather Barnett, Reader and Pathway Leader for MA Art and Science at Central Saint Martins, who led the Ecotechnic-metabolics workshop as part of Earth Week.

This Earth Week, the IMBY (In My Back Yard) team brought Ecotechnic-metabolics to the CSM Street and Roof Garden, inviting students and staff to imagine new forms of relationships between obsolete technology and urban gardens, and to ask what if the devices we throw away could help urban ecosystems thrive?

In the hands-on workshop, students and staff prototyped biosensors to monitor plant health (moisture and temperature), connecting the sensors to live plants and a digital interface that utilized old kindles to showcase the data readings. Participants also completed a visioning activity, developing ideas on how connect roof top gardens, create healthy urban ecosystems, and imagine new systems to enhance relationships between humans, plants, animals, and insects.

Ecotechnic-metabolics addresses two intertwined urgencies: the ecological need for adaptive urban green infrastructures and the environmental impact of e-waste. By fusing biological and technological metabolisms, we are co-designing circular strategies to extend material life cycles while fostering community-based ecological care. Our long-term ambition is to knit these devices into a "technological mycelium network:" a distributed monitoring system of roof gardens across King's Cross sharing ecological data, resources, and care.

The project emerged from a Technologies in Question hackathon at CSM in September 2025, where our interdisciplinary team first came together: Heather Barnett (MA Art and Science), Felix Loftus (MA Design for Industry 5.0; Physical Computing Lab), Rachel Pearl (MA Narrative Environments), Tim Harris and Devi Mohan (MA Innovation Management). Supported by a CSM KE Impact Fund, the project is mapping the urban garden spaces in the Kings Cross area, surveying device use and researching eco-monitoring technologies, and prototyping bio-sensing systems using unused devices. We are hosting a Stakeholders Workshop in May, gathering local community partners to envision a digitally connected network of urban gardens.

How to get involved...

• Take this short survey to help us build a picture of how we use and discard our old devices.

• Donate your outdated tech. Look for our donation box at the CSM Swap Shop and Physical Computing Lab, where you can drop off old phones, kindles, tablets, and other devices. Every piece of hardware has the potential to extend their lives as an infrastructure of care, rather than gathering dust and adding to the e-waste stream.