Living Systems and Micro-Utopias: Towards Continuous Designing

Nordic Human-Computer Interaction Conference

This text field is large enough to hold the appropriate release statement assuming it is single-spaced in Times New Roman 7-point font. Please do not change or modify the size of this text box. Each submission will be assigned a DOI string to be included here. Anthropocentric perspectives are common in design practice, but also contribute to a damaged planet. Requirements for sustainable processes resulted in novel practices such as biodesign, which investigates how living and regenerative resources can be used instead of artificial and polluting. However, many biodesign practices still seek to benefit humans. In this critique we compare the journey of two designers in the development of a toolkit to setup the bacterial powered light installation Electric Life for exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. We reflect on the designers' considerations when designing with microorganisms through the lenses of materiality, temporality, ecology, and agency. Our critique offers a discussion on the revision of a post-human biodesign approach from concern to care when designing-with the living and the questions we confronted throughout.

As we understand an extreme as a position away from a balanced, predictable and familiar centre, it is reasonable to examine a condition of extreme as it relates to complexity. In particular, if complexity is understood as a characterization of the degree to which something is composed of many parts, the degree to which those parts are interrelated and, further, the sophistication of the processes that define these very relationships, it is possible to imagine moving towards an extreme complexity.

FormAkademisk, 2018

The research claims that traditions are not static. They develop and adapt based on the present situation. Due to the recent climate extremes coming to formerly mild climate locations, their architectures can learn from traditional ones from more extreme climate locations. The present systemic design study on semi-interior, 'non-discrete spaces performances' (Hensel, 2013; Hensel & Turko, 2015) of Norwegian traditional architectures, so-called 'svalgangs' and 'skuts', examines its reuse for today's climate change adaptation and support of biodiversity, which is currently decreasing. These authors' historical research survey of performance, following similar studies by Hasan Fathy on architectural abiotic agency (Fathy, 1986), is motivated by design and co-develops its own systemic process-based methodology: 'Systemic Approach to Architectural Performance' (SAAP). This approach originates from 'Systems Oriented Design' (Sevaldson, 2013b), namely its use of gigamapping (Sevaldson, 2011, 2015) and 'Time Based Design' (Sevaldson, 2004). Here, these 'non-anthropocentric architectural' (Hensel, 2012) prototypes are in a process of over-evolving co-design with the ambient environment's abiotic and biotic agency, which also includes human agents. Keywords: Biodiversity and climate change adaptation, eco-systemic agency, non-discrete spaces and architectures, Systemic Approach to Architectural Performance, Systems Oriented Design, time-based design, research by design, full scale prototyping.

2020

It is increasingly clear that the sustainability transitions needed to counter climate change depend on lifestyle changes. However, the task of encouraging a shift to more sustainable lifestyles is highly complex. This paper describes an emerging design research method to explore possible pathways towards such sustainable transitions. We describe a living labs-approach based on design practice, developed within Green Leap, a design and sustainability research group at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. We refer to this method as Designerly Living Labs. Based on empirical learnings from four such Living Labs we present eight key characteristics. We then highlight some important aspects that affect how future concepts and solutions can be explored in connection with the lifestyles and material contexts on which they depend. One finding is that ‘living the change’ may be needed to identify potential positive, and often social gains from more sustainable practices.

Cleaner Production Journal

Abstract Regenerative design and development calls for a paradigm shift from the ‘mechanistic’ to the ‘ecological’ or living systems worldview that has emerged from living systems sciences over the last century. The challenge for design practitioners educated and now working in a field mainly shaped by a mechanistic worldview is two-fold: first, to develop an understanding of how life and living systems work and, second, to translate that understanding into application. The benefit of taking on this challenge is that understanding natural systems offers powerful insights into how to work across different scales of the built environment. This article looks at key and interrelated living systems’ principles and discusses how they translate into design and development practices, using examples of how actual projects worked across multiple scales. Principles considered include the nested or holarchic nature of living systems and the fact that a living system is not separable from its environment. Mapping a design project as a socio-ecological system nested within its immediate and larger contexts shifts designers’ attention to the unique and distinctive character of the project environment and the reciprocal influence project and environment exercise on each other. A second principle, that ecosystems’ self-organizing and self-regenerating capacity depends on its members carrying out their systemic roles provides the basis for defining and designing a distinctive and generative role for a project within their place. This role enables the project to be both more valuable and valued as a source of greater viability and vitality and, drawing on the first principle, to have a positive influence across different scales of nested wholes. The third principle relates to the webs of dynamic flows and metabolic exchanges that enable life to continuously produce, repair and perpetuate itself. Using insights gained from the understanding of the essence of a place, design practitioners are able to identify transformative nodal points within those webs where targeted acupuncture interventions, sometimes small, can influence the health and renewal of the whole system. In conclusion, the article first summarizes how working from an understanding of living systems principles provides insights into working regeneratively across and within different scales. Second, it addresses the need for the role of designers to shift and for new capabilities to be developed in order to incorporate those insights into new development and design practices. Third, it highlights some of the challenges design practitioners might face when implementing a living systems approach within the complexity of multi-disciplinary design projects.

Living areas play a key role within some changes, especially about the used methodologies and the compliance to the needs and expectations, as well as the quality of life. «The actual socio-economic context is characterised by a continuous change of its working, relational, familiar, and social models» (Diversereghi, Cavalleri, Rebecchi, 2012). With these premises, dwelling should represent a new and complex relation network in which ecology and Human Centered Design determine the relationship of the built environment with nature and people. In this view, Information Technology (IT) has a paradigmatic role in the habitation notion, from urban to architectonic scale. Indeed, data coming from urban systems become main substance of the project. This approach deviates from the figurativism of the twentieth century, since it is oriented to the evolution rather than to the praxis. We assert that this is a real process which guarantees the centrality of the relation network without forgetting the form control. In particular, we base the entire approach on the following four key points:

In March 2005, I presented a paper at the European Academy of Design conference in Bremen, Germany. It introduced the concept of the ‘natural design movement’ and discussed the relationship between eco-literacy, ethics, and aesthetics within the context of natural design. The paper proposed: “Eco-literacy – a detailed understanding of nature as a complex interacting, creative process in which humanity participates – results in a shift in perception towards an ecological ethics and aesthetics of participation that considers cultural, social and ecological, as well as economic value” (Wahl, 2005b, p.1). Such an approach tries to optimise human patterns of participation in natural process in such a way that it contributes to the health and sustainability of the overall system. The Natural Design Movement shares an ecological worldview. The movement unites diverse disciplines ranging from ecological design, industrial and urban ecology, sustainable architecture and bioregional planning to ecological economics, eco-literate education and green politics. Furthermore it considers the philosophical, sociological and psychological implications of the ecological worldview. Design in the 21st century will be grounded in eco-literacy and aspire toward community-based designs that are adapted to the specific conditions of a particular place and culture (Wahl, 2005b, p.1). The Natural Design Movement encompasses such diverse fields as ecological product-, process- and institutional design, sustainable architecture, community-, urban- and bioregional planning, industrial ecology, and ecological engineering, but also political systems of governance, ecological economics, education for sustainability, renewable resource based technologies and energy production, as well as aspects of bionics, eco-technology, and green chemistry. All of which will be discussed in more detail in chapters four and five. As I have already alluded to in chapter two, the natural design movement is united through a salutogenic intentionality behind design on all scales of the fundamentally interconnected whole in which we participate. The perception, preservation and restoration of the condition of systemic health, or dynamic stability, are the underlying strategies of all sustainable designs. Salutogenesis, or health generation at the scale of local and global ecosystems and social systems has to become the priority of design in the 21st Century if we want to create a sustainable global civilization through diverse, locally adapted cultures of co-operation (Wahl, 2005b, pp.15-16). This chapter suggests that such a design response to the current crisis of unsustainability is already emerging, represented by a diverse, international movement which is as yet not fully integrated and conscious of its own existence. This thesis hopes to facilitate the process of networking that is necessary to unite this trans-disciplinary, scale-linking movement by providing a generalised map of its various contributories. This chapter begins with a brief history of ecologically conscious design and introduces some of the key visionaries who have prepared the ground for its emergence. It starts with an acknowledgement of the important influence of traditional and indigenous knowledge on appropriate design; and highlights the influence Sir Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford, Buckminster Fuller, Ian McHarg and Victor Papanek on the natural design movement. Subchapter two discusses the concept of natural design within the context of the shift in perception facilitated by an ecological worldview. It suggests that a participatory understanding of humanity’s involvement in natural process dissolves the apparent paradox of natural design which itself is simply the result of employing an epistemology of Cartesian dualism. Subchapter three explores the relationship between ecological literacy, an expanded horizon of empathy and self-identification, and ethical and aesthetic perception and judgement. It offers a more detailed exploration of how the emerging natural design movement also engenders a fundamental reconsideration of our understanding of ethics and aesthetics. Subchapter four describes how the various members of the natural design movement have approached nature as a source of knowledge, wisdom and insight that deeply informs their design process. It discusses and exemplifies a new way of learning from nature. And finally, subchapter five continues with the theme of responsible co-design of humanity’s active participation in natural processes, by exploring the notion of co-design of complex systems, which serves as a general introduction to the scales of sustainable design and the complex scale-linking issues that are explored in much more detail in chapters four and five. ...

Architectural projects have conventionally been conceived as a linear progression from conception to completion, from site to site, and through an idealised timeline, whereby progression goes from stage to stage. However, recent ethnographic accounts of architectur-al practices, informed by Science and Technology Stud-ies (STS) and Actor-Network Theory (ANT) have shown that design develops differently: often through multi-ple irregular and bifurcating paths. This article argues that a building-in-the-making, in particular during the construction stage (rarely explored in the design stud-ies literature), develops not through a linear project logic but along a contingent and branching trajectory, as it twists and turns through a complex ecology of actors (developers, city planners, clients, contractors, engineers, etc.) according to ‘matters of concern.’ A multi-sited ethnographic approach based on ‘ecologies of practice’ will allow us to account for the varying sets of experiences and ontologies that can be witnessed as a building concept is shaped during design develop-ment and construction. This will be illustrated by shad-owing Carol, an architect from OMA, during the design development and construction stages of the Factory project in Manchester, UK, where we will witness how design does not progress along a linear path, but rather bifurcates, shifts and aligns in a dynamic way.

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