Rooted

We scroll, we pass, we forget. Yet the tools that make us numb can also be the ones that make us pause. rooted: Living Archives of Displaced Ecologies is an experience design project grounded in participatory design, speculative design, and design activism, asking how collective memory, ecological grief, and the layers of who defends the land can find a place in the streets we rush through every day. The project unfolds in three layers. The first is a physical trace in the street. A base with a sticker on it, borrowing the visual language of street art culture, the kind of thing you pass without knowing who put it there or why. But this one has layers. Embedded inside is an NFC tag, invisible, waiting. The second layer begins when you tap your phone. A speculative plant appears in the space in front of you through augmented reality, one of three plants born from ecologically threatened sites in Türkiye: Akbelen, Mount Latmos, and the Bosphorus and Marmara Sea. Each plant carries the biological memory of what grew there before, adapted and mutated, as if nature found a way to return. The third layer is the website, a living archive that holds the story of each plant: its origins, the destruction, the resistance, and the sonic memory of its landscape. Together, they create a moment that asks: what is worth remembering, and who gets to decide?