Nature Directed

The first arts and cultural organisation anywhere to appoint Nature to its Board of Directors.

The boldest initiative of FutureEverything's final years, Nature Directed remade the organisation from the ground up – reorienting its governance, artistic programme and daily operations around the rights and intelligence of the natural world. Where FutureEverything had long explored the social and civic dimensions of technology, Nature Directed extended that to reimagine organisational models and creative practice for an era of ecological emergency and technological acceleration. It drew on the growing Rights of Nature movement to ask what cultural organisations owe the more-than-human world – and to answer through practice.

The idea was to go beyond symbolic gesture: to pathfind ways of working guided by, and accountable to, Nature's intelligence, foregrounding reconnection, justice and repair across technology and cultural practice. This meant grappling with genuinely hard questions – from who speaks for Nature and how, to how we interpret the myriad ways in which Nature “speaks” itself, and how we find a balance between human and more-than-human interests. The point was not to solve these questions, but to figure out how to live ethically with them.

In October 2025, FutureEverything amended its constitution to give Nature binding influence across strategic planning, programming and everyday operations – a global first, and the culmination of a twelve-month process of research, legal work and organisational change. It made Nature's role in governance real and accountable, not aspirational

A detailed diagram resembling an insect with labeled sections related to organizational values, including responsibilites, principles, protocols, and programs. Around it are three smaller star-like diagrams labeled 'accountability', 'leadership', and 'kinship'.

The model

Nature Directed sought wholesale organisational and behavioural transformation rather than symbolic gesture. FutureEverything's constitution was amended to embed Nature as a company director with voting rights across all organisational matters. New protocols were developed and embedded across operations, programming and creative workflows. Webs of Justice – FutureEverything's statement of responsibilities – framed the organisation's commitments and shaped its creative vision.

Dani Admiss was appointed as FutureEverything's first Nature Director, bringing ecological care, artistic insight and governance expertise to the Board. Her role was to act for Nature within the organisation – influencing decisions, holding the organisation to its commitments, and ensuring the more-than-human world had a genuine say rather than a nominal presence.

The model was developed with a clear-eyed recognition that the same power structures driving technological harm also drive environmental harm – the two are not separate problems. It positioned technology not as neutral infrastructure but as a material, political and relational practice – one that could contribute to ecological destruction or enable restoration, depending on the values and structures that govern it. Nature Directed brought these questions into the centre of how FutureEverything worked, not as a critical commentary on others but as a live experiment within its own organisation.

The initiative was conceived and led by Creative Director Lucy Rose Sollitt.

  • An outdoor gathering with people sitting on benches, listening to a woman speaking on a stage under a vine-covered structure, with greenery and a partly cloudy sky in the background.

    Nature Directed Lab

    Creative R&D programme developing practical methods for more-than-human participation in cultural organisations. Working with artists, researchers and changemakers, the Lab translated Nature Directed's principles into tools and approaches that other organisations could take up and use.

  • Drawing of a starfish and seashells arranged in a circle.

    Nature Directed Incubator

    A consultancy enabling other organisations to embed ecological governance into their practice, integrating legal expertise, systems thinking and creative methodology. Three tiers: introduction, feasibility and full implementation. The mechanism through which Nature Directed extends across the cultural sector.

  • Compost Computer

    Compost Computer

    The inaugural commission of Nature Directed's artistic programme. Developed with UAL's Critical Climate Computing team and Manchester community partners MUD and Sow the City, it transformed bio-energy from compost into electricity to power a low-carbon web server – technology not extracted from the earth but returned to it.

How it was shaped

In autumn 2024, FutureEverything convened a multidisciplinary Working Group to develop the Nature Directed model. It brought together environmental lawyers, Indigenous knowledge practitioners, researchers in multispecies and environmental justice, artists, technologists and environmentalists. Together they interrogated the questions at the centre of the work: how Nature can be authentically represented; how to resist the tendency to centre human or colonial perspectives; what it means for an organisation to genuinely listen to the more-than-human world.

Working in collaboration with Lawyers for Nature – architects, alongside the Earth Law Center, of Nature on the Board as a governance concept – the group shaped a model grounded in legal expertise, ecological knowledge and creative practice. The process was iterative: the model was tested, challenged and refined throughout, with the Working Group playing a constitutive rather than merely advisory role.

The work continues

FutureEverything has always seeded initiatives that outlast it. Nature Directed is the latest. Lucy Sollitt, who conceived and led Nature Directed, is taking the initiative forward with other cultural organisations. That too is characteristic of FutureEverything: the practitioners it nurtured going on to shape what comes next. Read Lucy's profile

Further reading

Read more about Nature Directed on the 2019-2026 FutureEverything website.