How can design help us coexist with other species? 

The goal of this artistic research project is to build textile-based artifacts that invite interaction with insects and other living organisms. The project examines how to design for, relate to, and coexist with multiple species. 

The installation is a combination of experimental objects and allows for the open-endedness of discovering how local ecosystems engage with them, how the interaction changes over time, under different weather conditions and during different seasons, and how the researcher’s perception and way of living are impacted by living with the research experiments.

The project also established the I.N.S.E.C.T. Summercamp, an annual event and multidisciplinary community that seeks to advance Multispecies Design Perspectives through collaborations in research, practice, and education.

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.