This paper presents experiences from a two-day teaching workshop where first year students in architecture meet with first year students in textile design for an assignment on building structures with textile, soil and plants designing for indoor gardening with the aim of inspiring for more sustainable lifestyles. The background is a research project on textile architecture with the objective of exploring this new field and to establish a platform for long-term collaboration between the disciplines of architecture and textile design. The paper addresses pedagogical challenges in the meeting between first-years students of different disciplines and traditions, but also in the meeting between research and undergraduate teaching. The students produced creative results but had difficulties in exploring the full complexity of the task. An evaluative discussion is based on observations, photo documentation, notes during group discussions, follow-up questionnaires among the students and reflections among involved researchers.

One of the red lines of aesthetics as modern established discipline was the definition of media categories and disciplines in order to support ‘efficient’ ways of expression. The debate between Gotthold Lessing and Charles Batteux in the 18th century, and later on the propositions of artists and critics in the beginning of the 20th century, have all emphasized the need of a certain ‘aesthetic efficiency’ of artistic production. This aesthetic ‘efficiency’, a term of economical ascendency, was to be achieved by taking into account the limitations of materials used by different forms of expressions and the sensorial channels they were addressing. The present paper questions the notions of ‘media efficiency’, ‘economy of attention’ and ‘media ecology’ through an intermedia research based on a series of experiments with edible materials, conducted during a workshop on textile interactions in the frame of ArcInTex Conference at the Swedish School of Textiles in Borås in April 2016. The paper suggests that the present intermediality researches are the signs of a new paradigm that tries to exceed the modern industrial affordances schemas.

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.

This research explores the dynamic qualities of plant degradation in textile structures for interior and aims to develop alternative aesthetics, interactions, life–cycles and applications for living with plants by referring to outdoor expressions and experiences. A series of material explorations illustrates the potential of corn seeds in textile indoor applications, focusing on aesthetics and material properties of degradation to create an interplay of texture, structure, form and color. The hybrid textiles refer to Blaisse view on curtains as fluid atmospheres and second skin, challenging the static nature of architecture and reinforcing the dialogue between landscape and interior. Bringing aesthetics of decay into interior spaces not only challenges the nature of materials, it also invites to rethink the aesthetic and cultural bias towards natural processes in interior scenarios.

The emergence of biodesign opens new ways for textile design and production processes by e.g. using living organisms directly for growing or dyeing textiles. Researchers and designers who engage in such practices often describe their processes as a collaboration with the living. Since maintenance or acts of caring are often fundamental for a successful result, supportive environments for the living are created. However, most of the organisms are only used to carry out a specific task given by the designers’ intention, e.g., excreting pigments to dye a piece of silk, and are killed after the successful completion of the “collaborative” project, which is one of the reasons why the anthropocentric perspective remains an integral part of the textile design process.

This research aims to challenge the anthropocentrism inherent in textile design methodologies. Drawing from the work of Donna Haraway, in this exploratory paper, I advocate for exploring more than anthropocentric and multispecies perspectives to textile design by understanding the textile design practice as a way of being-with and staying-with, rather than as a solution-driven practice. Therefore, I revisit and reflect on three stories that derived from encounters between humans and insects in shared textile contexts. The stories on multispecies cohabitation resulted from the autobiographic research ‘Textile Farming’. Weaving connections between contemporary approaches to design, this paper proposes a conceptual framework of the levels that designers can engage with the living e.g., designing with, for, or together with living organisms up to living-with and becoming-with. I found these reflections to offer valuable perspectives to reflect on, analyze, and discuss processes in which living organisms play a role. Consequently, the paper contributes to reflective practice and opens up the textile design practice towards open-ended events as a more than anthropocentric approach to designing textiles.

This paper attempts to illustrate a „Material System“ that can exemplify a hybrid material behavior through a designed assembly of two categories of materials (biological and textile). The transformable system is achieved by natural dynamic transformations, using the potential of seeds for their passive and active, adaptive and responsive characteristics. The paper will showcase a series of experiments illustrating alternative forms of plant organization, human management and dynamic transformation in textile interior scenarios. The use of jacquard double weave structures on industrial machines allows a variety of patterns and constructions. Pocket weave is used in order to create enclosures capable of accommodating external elements such as seeds seamlessly. Activated by surrounding factors and forms of human management, the final prototypes, presented within an interior scenario, attempt to utilize the various behavioral properties, creating a non–tech responsive structure. Consequently, the research opens up the design space for climate responsive architectural structures where the responsive capacity is embedded in the structure of the material system itself. The paper aims to contribute to the future development of biophilic design and biodesign in the context of textile and interior design.

Horticultural practices are increasingly entering the private realm due to the popularity of urban gardening, indoor gardening systems, and architectural propositions to join living spaces for people and vegetable cultivation in order to promote more resilient and sustainable ways of living. While new research into symbiotic processes between living organisms and their ability to sense and reason triggers new works of art, culture, design, and architecture, the organisation of indoor plants remains mainly unaffected. This is due to the fact that many of the examples that aim to bring together people and plants in an architectural context are characterised by rigid materials and technical systems that separate people and plants from each other and feature relatively unnatural environments, compositions, and expressions. In proposing an alternative perspective on this, On Textile Farming explores textiles as flexible systems for integrating plant growth in textile materials. The collaboration with AB Ludvig Svensson, a developer and producer of textiles for interiors and greenhouses, involved a joint approach to the two distinct areas of climate screens and interior textiles. Through experimental methods, interactions between plants and textiles were explored using double-weave structures to integrate seeds and substrate. A methodological framework is proposed wherein the processes and materials of textile and spatial design open up for environmental parameters, e.g. changes in time, climate, and material behaviour. The design concepts ‘textile permeability’, ‘seasonal textiles’, and ‘textile climate’ describe the interactions between plants, textiles, and space, and can be seen as first steps towards an interior textile ecosystem in which spaces are composed of relationships between biotic and abiotic components, causing the natural and the artificial to intersect. ‘Spatial permeability’, ‘seasonal interiors’ and ‘spatial climates’ expand the three textile concepts towards space and describe interactions between different spatial qualities that were explored through autobiographical research; for this, an experimental house was built in a rural region of Sweden and lived in. In this context, textiles be-came flexible interfaces between the inside and the outside, guiding growth and melting into seasonal expressions that blurred nature and artifice.

Presently, designing with living systems such as insects, fungi and bacteria has become an area of extended interest, proposing collaborative processes of designing and manufacturing - as a solution for symbiotic ways of living. On the scale of the interior, modern systems for interior gardening, combining both functional, e.g., food supply, purifying the air, and aesthetic values, experience exceptional popularity, ensuring a complementary perspective on horticultural landscapes indoors. As a result, the spaces where people live and crops grow increasingly intersect and therefore open

up for developments that bridge both areas and where aesthetic perspectives become equally important. However, modern indoor gardening systems are shaped by commercial horticultural practices, bringing reservoirs such as buckets, tubs or tanks, mostly built of plastic, into the homes. Textile Farming aims to explore alternative forms of plant organisation by blending seeds and textile structures into a hybrid material for textile interior scenarios. Consequently the materials’ performative capacity becomes part of the textile design process. A foundational part are forms of human management, e.g. activation of the seeds, maintenance of the plants, interaction with the hybrid textile structures within and beyond interiors, that leads to experiences and expressions. By practice based design research and through a series of design examples that explore the transformative potential of seeds in textile structures, alternative forms of plant organisation and methods for the textile design process lead to scenarios that propose alternatives to how we live with and organise plants today.

Alongside with smart materials, biomaterials become increasingly available to the field of textile design. This biological paradigm brings an alternative perspective to the ways in which textiles can be designed, present themselves, and can be dealt with. As biomaterials such as plants and bacteria thrive in symbiosis with their environment, their ecosystem consequently becomes disposable to the expressions of textiles and interior spaces. Here, textiles could take on the role of a mediator for ecosystem services, e.g. guiding the growth of crops, regulating indoor climates and supporting the decomposition of waste. This research aims to explore what the design of a ‘textile interior ecosystem’ would be like and discusses what the role of textiles as accommodating biological processes in relation to this system could be. By experimental research, ‘On Textile Farming’ explores the design of ‘textile interior ecosystem’ investigating e.g. growing crops, composting and fermenting in interior spaces in order to speculate how these biological principles could be translated into the design of textiles and how this would change the way we form interior spaces, live with them and understand them - as a community of living systems. By embedding biological agents e.g. plants and bacteria into interior fabrics, a biological perspective is added to their life-cycle. Here, the role of the textile is opened up towards a substrate for biological agents, a template for growth and a mediator in between all actors involved in the ‘textile interior ecosystem’. As a result, this research presents speculative scenarios which exemplify the extended life-cycle, illustrate the increase in interior diversity and forms of habitation using textiles, from an aesthetic and functional point of view. In a time in which the way we handle relationships to biotic and abiotic components is discussed and criticised, ‘On Textile Farming’ could open up a range of concepts unfamiliar to designing textiles and spaces, such as ‘Seasonal Interiors’, ’Multispecies Interplay’ and ‘Textile Hortitecture’.

 The emergence of biodesign, as a new field in design, opens up the design process for new methods, techniques and materials, consequently these new possibilities offer special potential for the textile design practice i.e. integrating living systems into textile structures. The purpose of this work is to develop knowledge on dynamic and active expressions through using bio–based materials in textile design processes. Major placeholders are exploring new forms of plant organization, and challenging existing concepts of living with plants, focusing on surface aesthetics. By practice–based design research, the experimental design explorations will illustrate the expressiveness of growth, wilderness and decay, using moisture, light and heat as design materials. This pictorial shows 10 sets of experiments that explore dynamic transformations of bio–based materials such as seeds and plants in interaction with textile materials and techniques like weaving, knitting and crochet. Consequently, the experiments illustrate potentialities in a design space where plants are placed as living materials for new processes and dynamic expressions. Subsequently, these materials open up the discussion on alternative aesthetics when designing interior textiles and designing spatial scenarios with them. The integration of living systems and dynamic expressions, especially towards growth, wilderness and decay, rises new issues i.e. their integration, maintenance, application and interaction. 

We present the two-part I.N.S.E.C.T Summercamp 2022, which aimed to connect designers and researchers who are invested in multispecies perspectives for design. Co-creation was used as a strategy for organizational purposes and co-creation methods played a major role to promote innovative outcomes and strengthen the ownership of solutions and trust among participants. The two parts of the summercamp followed different strategies for co-creating the facilitation and organization of the camp experiences and led, to different degrees, to co-creation that continues beyond the duration of the camp. We apply Bentzen’s conceptual framework, “a continuity perspective on co-creation” as a means to map, describe, and reflect upon the levels, phases, and the roles of involvement of organizers, and human and non-human participants (2022). Part 1 (Case 1) was organized with the focus on designing-for, whereas Part 2 (Case 2) centered around ways of being-with other living beings, i.e., insects. Through this case study, we present and discuss a program and two formats that are based on human co-creation and that allow us to engage with our own and other species more deeply. Thereby we strengthen the field of multispecies design and respond to one of the biggest challenges designers face today: integrating post-anthropocentric perspectives into their work.

This pictorial confronts the urgent need to shift design practices in response to the past and ongoing destruction of habitat structures and the resulting losses of biodiversity. To do this, it illustrates the first iteration of I.N.S.E.C.T. Wall Twin: an architectural installation that endeavours to support coexistence between local insects, fungi, and humans. The installation is an outcome of the workshop “Interspecies Exploration by Bio- Digital Manufacturing Technologies” during the first part of the I.N.S.E.C.T. Summer Camp (Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom, August 2022). The 9-day workshop brought together a group of four organisers and nine selected participants to engage with the challenges of designing for and with other living beings. Aiming to develop novel approaches to creating urban habitat structures, the workshop involved parametric design, clay 3D printing, mycelium-based composites, and freeform crocheting. We explored questions of interspecies design by prototyping objects iteratively while conversing and reflecting. Our discussion lists the insights we gained from this process of collaborative and critical making. We offer suggestions for involving a range of human and nonhuman stakeholders in design; reflect on practical and ethical questions when working with living materials; identify challenges of foregrounding nonhuman needs while dealing with technical or logistical constraints; and outline ways to approach the complexity of intervening in ecosystems. These considerations may help inform the future work of designers who want to integrate the perspectives of multiple species into their designs. As a living laboratory undergoing continual monitoring, I.N.S.E.C.T. Wall Twin provides a useful foundation for developing further iterations and a community that exceeds the duration of the camp. 

In this workshop, we will bring together designers and researchers working with, for, and around nature to facilitate a transversal conversation around how to engage nature as a key part of our design processes. By deliberately adopting an open and ambiguous idea of what we mean by ‘nature’, we hope to embrace diverse kinds of more-than-human entanglements, including (but not only): farming, companion species, microbiomes, body ecologies, forests and other large-scale landscapes (e.g. oceans), or cohabitation in houses. We argue for the importance of taking such an open-ended perspective, to embrace all possible relevant vectors of nature-related design: multispecies, cohabitation, posthuman sustainability, posthuman care… The workshop is set as a as a platform for shared methodological reflection through the lenses of a more-than-human approach to posthuman research. It will primarily be in-person, given our aim of bringing researchers together and co-experiencing each others’ methods and techniques.

For quite some time, the Royal Danish Academy has focused on exploring new ways to reduce carbon emissions in building projects, to refurbish and restore buildings rather than build new ones, and to create designs that last. The focal point of the Planetary Boundaries – Rethinking Architecture and Design exhibition is to perceive the world from a fresh perspective, seeking an approach to architecture and design disciplines that revolves around planetary well-being and the state of the global environment.

Events of recent years have manifested what science has been forecasting for a long time: Climate change has become an obvious, red-hot truth. The climate is changing, and this is affecting the planet. The impact of human activity on the planet’s ecosystem can now be clearly felt in the state of the global environment. Climate change is not an eventuality; it is already here.

Planetary Boundaries is a theory that is used to describe our global limitations. It examines what the Earth can endure before irreversible imbalances are created in our ecosystem. It is a theory focused on the planet’s needs rather than our needs: What does the planet need in the struggle for its own survival and the survival of natural environments and human beings?

Architecture and design – along with agriculture, transportation and other industries – have contributed to overconsumption of the world’s resources. This is why the Royal Danish Academy is rethinking how the architecture and design of the future can co-exist with a balanced planet. We are intently focused on making the requisite transition, because durable solutions are strongly linked to good architectural and design solutions.

This exhibition allows you to experience 25 selected projects which – from an academic architectural or design perspective – ponder the potential for innovative design, building materials and types of dwellings with wide-ranging aesthetics – but a tiny planetary footprint. There are experiments, specific proposals and ambitious explorations of how we need to transition, and rethink our conventional view of architecture and design.

Planetary Boundaries originates from the Stockholm Resilience Centre at the University of Stockholm. The centre measures the planetary boundaries that have been exceeded and the remaining scope for manoeuvre on the basis of nine parameters, all of which provide a situational report on the state of the global environment. Planetary Boundaries has been used by the UN, the EU and other bodies in drawing up climate policies, and it serves as the foundation for a host of other climate-related theories.

Each of the 25 projects exhibited considers one or more of the nine parameters.