Jingwen Zeng  




Become Pollinators

2024–2025










Collaborated with
Hammersmith Community Gardens Association (HCGA)
Phoenix Garden

Collaborated with the Phoenix Garden and the Hammersmith Community Gardens Association, this project comprises a series of participatory workshops and a community planting platform, developed with the Phoenix Garden and Hammersmith Community Gardens Association. The project invites Londoners into the world of urban pollinators through immersive and sensory experiences, and then gives them the hands-on and digital tools to act on what they've felt, designing real pollinator-friendly spaces in their own homes and build community around it.







Community Platform
Participatory Workshop
Community-designed Pollinator Habitats






Starting Point

Urbanization and climate change have fragmented pollinator habitats, making their decline not only spatial but also perceptual and relational. In dense cities like London, this loss is often hidden in mono-functional landscapes. 
Mainstream ecological initiatives often prioritize data-driven outcomes and anthropocentric benefits. Framed by technocratic logic and institutional efficiency, these approaches—while scientifically grounded—tend to excludes more relational, place-based, and affective forms of public engagement that are vital to cultivating lasting ecological care and responsibility.










Experience Journey

Participants first drew pollinators to reflect on how they perceive them; then used VR to experience the city from a bee’s perspective; next, they felt bee vibrations through a sound-based floral sonification installation to understand pollination behaviour; and finally, they worked together using the toolkit to design real pollinator habitats for their personal spaces.

This process moved from sensory attunement to cognitive translation, then to spatial application, each stage reinforcing the next.






Virtual Reality Experience, HCGA, 2025
Virtual Reality Experience, Phoenix Garden, 2025

                                                                   Virtual Reality Environmental Design





Habitat Co-creation Toolkit

Community-designed Pollinator Habitats
Habitat Co-creation Experience, HCGA, 2025




Versions of the workshop were also held at Mediaworks, BFI, BBC Television Center and London Breeze Film Festival to raise a broader awareness about pollinators.





 Media Works, 2025 

Community Planting Platform

Following the workshops, I developed an AI-powered online platform to extend the experience beyond the physical sessions, allowing participants to continue designing pollinator-friendly spaces for their own homes and neighbourhoods. 







The tool translated what people had learned and experienced in the workshop into something they could act on independently, but as a community.







More importantly, the platform functioned as a prototype for a grassroots urban pollinator support system. By connecting individual planting efforts across different communities, it demonstrated how small-scale local actions could be coordinated and expanded into a wider network of pollinator-friendly habitats across the city.