BioTokenist

REGENERATIVE DESIGN | POLITICAL ECOLOGY | MORE-THAN-HUMAN DESIGN | SYSTEMS THINKING

Capstone Project | RMIT University | March 2025 – June 2025

Project Overview

In an era where environmental accountability is more crucial than ever before, BioTokenist emerges as a critical design-led assembly aimed at surfacing and demystifying Environmental Trading Markets (ETMs) for non-expert audiences. This project explores the fundamental mechanisms of ETMs, which, despite being conceived as tools to combat environmental degradation through capitalistic mechanisms, often end up commodifying nature into linear, quantifiable frameworks. BioTokenist challenges this reductionist approach, revealing how even well-intentioned market systems can perpetuate the very capitalist tendencies they seek to mitigate.

The project culminates in an immersive digital installation titled “False Boundaries,” a microfiction using a monitored terrarium as a metaphor for ETMs. This thought experiment questions the agency of nonhuman entities within market systems, highlighting the anthropocentric logic that imposes value on nature. Through design research and storytelling, BioTokenist brings to the forefront discussions on ecological accountability, human and nonhuman agency, and capitalism’s mechanistic tendencies. BioTokenist invites audiences to reconsider environmental stewardship. It challenges capitalist frameworks shaping our interactions with nature, aiming to provoke thought and awareness by encouraging a critical examination of capitalism’s role in addressing the climate crisis.

BioTokenist Actor-Network Map, Tejas Madhusudan Bharadwaj, 2025

Research Question

How might we expose and critique the systems that tokenise nature under capitalist logic? BioTokenist investigates the manipulation of ecological data through digital tokens, questioning who benefits from “sustainability” when nature is treated as currency.

Methodology & Research Approach

Environmental Trading Markets (ETMs)
The project began with a focused literature review of Environmental Trading Markets, examining carbon markets, biodiversity offsets, and emerging ecological asset classes. This research analysed how ecological value is quantified, traded, and governed, identifying systemic contradictions between environmental protection and market-driven logic.

Expert Interviews
To ground the research in contemporary practice, I conducted interviews with professionals working across environmental finance, climate technology, and sustainability sectors. These conversations surfaced recurring tensions between ethical intent, regulatory frameworks, and real-world implementation, informing the project’s critical positioning.

Philosophical & Theoretical Framing
The research was further informed by Gaian ontologies, debates surrounding the Anthropocene and Symbiocene, Actor–Network Theory, and Object-Oriented Ontology. These frameworks were used to interrogate the epistemological assumptions that underpin ecological quantification, ownership, and agency, shaping both the conceptual argument and design direction.

Narrative & Speculative Translation
To translate complex systemic dynamics into an accessible yet critical form, the project employed speculative storytelling as a research method. Narrative structures drawn from Indian, Japanese, and Western traditions were combined with interface design to create a poetic, interactive system that communicates abstract ecological economies through experience rather than explanation.

Exhibition & Spatial Design
The research culminated in the design of an interactive installation. Precedent studies of contemporary exhibitions informed decisions around spatial sequencing, visitor interaction, and immersive storytelling. The installation functions as both a design outcome and a research artefact, testing how critical ecological narratives can be embodied, encountered, and reflected upon by an audience.

BioTokenist Research Paradigm, Tejas Madhusudan Bharadwaj, 2025

Design Outcome

This installation used a monitored terrarium as a metaphor for ETMs, questioning the agency of nonhuman entities and highlighting anthropocentric logic.

Through design research and storytelling, BioTokenist provoked thought on ecological accountability and the role of capitalism in environmental stewardship.

BioTokenist Terrarium Dashboard (TouchDesigner interface screenshot), Tejas Madhusudan Bharadwaj, 2025

BioTokenist Human Dashboard (TouchDesigner interface screenshot), Tejas Madhusudan Bharadwaj, 2025

BioTokenist Interactive Installation, RMIT Building 50, Melbourne, 2025. Public installation view. Tejas Madhusudan Bharadwaj.

Design Research Compendium

Key Insights

Environmental Trading Markets reveal how ecological harm is often addressed through abstraction, reduction, and commodification rather than relational accountability.

Quantifying nature into credits and metrics reinforces anthropocentric control, stripping ecological systems of agency while maintaining extractive logics.

Speculative, research-through-design methods can make opaque planetary mechanisms legible to non-expert audiences without oversimplifying their ethical complexity.

Translating theory into tangible, interactive artefacts enabled empathy and critical reflection in ways that purely academic or policy-driven discourse could not.

Reflection

Learning Trajectory

During the commencement of this project, I had next to no knowledge of the mechanisms of ETMs and, in fact, learned of their existence only two months prior. Initially, I was under the impression that they seemed an effective approach to ecological accountability due to a “fight capitalism through capitalism” stance. However, as I explored the topic through conducting literature reviews and talking to various experts with differing opinions on the effectiveness of ETMs, I identified that ETMs perpetuate the very same issues they intend to tackle. In typical practice-led design fashion, the initial focus led me into a path of broad exploration (Fig 4) — engaging, with an open mind, with concepts such as the history and philosophy of capitalism, new frameworks of design (such as critical and speculative design), traditional and contemporary storytelling techniques, and ontological and epistemological frameworks that inform more-than-human thought processes (such as Gaian Ontology, Object Oriented Ontology, Actor-Network Theory).

Key Challenge

While exploring complex topics for the first time, I naturally gravitated towards words and concepts that fascinated me. My interest in semantics led me to overanalyse the words when what was imperative was to disseminate knowledge to a broad audience with varied levels of understanding of the topics I aimed to tackle. Over multiple feedback sessions with my supervisors, I developed a two-part workflow that first allowed me to map out these concepts in a manner that aligns with how I understand them, and later continue to iteratively distill information into layered, situated, and tangible outputs that can be understood with minimal time and effort.

Key Tangent

Beyond the knowledge I gained throughout the undertaking of this project, an unanticipated tangent I embarked upon was the exploration of the history of philosophy and metaphysics, particularly in the fields of speculative realism and speculative materialism. While their direct applicability towards pragmatic design solutions may be limited, these frameworks further informed a posthumanist approach towards my design practice.

Valuable Experiences

Engaging in continuous, hands-on design research (research through design) revealed a critical learning: design is research, and research is design. The knowledge gained through iterative prototyping, attending presentations and conferences, and visiting discursive public installations that disseminate knowledge is equivalent to focused academic desk research. In order to gain a holistic perspective of any concept, it requires engaging with the concept from multiple angles, lenses, and with an element of tangibility that can only be realised through a hands-on approach.

My two supervisors offered differing yet complementary perspectives on the project’s trajectories. In addition to their guidance, I engaged with a broad network of experts conducting valuable research in environmental policy, nature-based solutions, and the ethical use of technology and artificial intelligence. Synthesising these valuable, multifaceted perspectives of a highly debated issue allowed me to arrive at an informed, original design outcome that contributes meaningfully to ongoing critical discourse.

Final Thoughts and Future Directions

In essence, BioTokenist serves as a bridge between audiences that hold the potential to disrupt paradigms, and the planetary mechanisms that cause harm in the current paradigm. As my design practice continues to evolve, I intend to continue engaging with the systems that hold the potential to enable positive change — actively conducting sustained design research that contributes toward a regenerative existence.

Acknowledgements

This project is dedicated to my guides, Dr. Sophie Gaur and Dr. Olivier Cotsaftis, who encouraged me at every step of the way to push further, dig deeper, and truly think before acting. I’m proud to have worked on this project under their guidance;

To my parents, who were always genuinely interested in even the most obscure topics I got into with this project;

And to all the people that have helped me bring this project to where it stands today

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