ABSTRACT
Biodesign is considered as a new industrial paradigm holding the potential to fundamentally change the way we produce and impact the environment through e.g., the building practice. Within biodesign the living is predominantly described as providing resources that can be used and programmed. The livingness is reduced to being a material quality in design that is compelling due to its dynamic, performative, and temporal dimensions. Thereby, the methods of specification and representation are often fundamentally anthropocentric and create hierarchical relationships. At the same time, biodesign holds the potential to re-think nature culture relationships and challenge these hierarchies, especially when it comes to envisioning and designing living environments that are shared with others e.g., insects and plants. Therefore, we need to expand conceptions of biodesign beyond how we currently work with living matter, materials, and organisms. This research aims to investigate emerging practices, environments, and mindsets that reach a more inclusive approach to biodesign. Therefore, we conducted interviews with selected practitioners who developed an experimental practice or mindset as a result of their “reflective conversation with the materials of a situation” and their species-specific demands. This paper contributes to the biodesign discourse and provides incentives about how the built environment can respond to, and develop together with other living organisms. We want to challenge biodesign as merely a new industrial variety and material practice towards an activity that includes and gives space to the agency of living organisms and their creative potential to design our lives as much as we design theirs. Building on the interview data, we argue for a “fluid design landscape”, as a more responsive methodological framework that encourages biodesigners to integrate a larger array of methods and environments into their practices, while remaining open to exploring ways of co-creating and co-evolving with the living world.
