Architecture, Building and Planning - Research Publications
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ItemMore-than-human Infrastructure for Just Resilience: Learning from, Working with, and Designing for Bald Cypress Trees (Taxodium distichum) in the Mississippi River Delta(White Horse Press, 2021-09-01)Humans design infrastructure for human needs, with limited regard for the needs of nonhumans such as animals and plants. Humans also often fail to recognise nonhuman lifeforms such as trees as fellow engineers designers, or architects, even though the contribution of trees to ecosystem services is well established and their right to justice ought to be recognised. Studies have shown that flood-control infrastructure near the Mississippi River inadvertently left Southern Louisiana more vulnerable to coastal threats. We examine this characteristic outcome and identify infrastructural injustices in multispecies communities. Based on theories in philosophy and design supported by historical analyses, we defend the proposals to extend 1) the understanding of resilience to include more-than-human communities; and 2) the notion of justice to include non-human stakeholders. The reframing in more-than-human terms is already under way in a variety of disciplines. However, these efforts rarely extend into considerations of practical design and have attracted criticism for insufficient engagement with historical processes and the accumulations of power and responsibility. To illustrate these injustices, we trace the history of bald cypress trees (Taxodium distichum) in the Mississippi River Delta and show how infrastructure impacted the trees. This analysis demonstrates that designs that do not consider the needs of vulnerable stakeholders can cause harm in multispecies communities. In response, we propose that humans can work to improve infrastructural resilience by including humans and nonhumans as collaborators.
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ItemRespect for Old Age and Dignity in Death: The Case of Urban Trees(SAHANZ, 2021-07-01)How can humanist principles of respect, dignity, and care inform and improve design for non-human lifeforms? This paper uses ageing and dying urban trees to understand how architectural, urban, and landscape design respond to nonhuman concerns. It draws on research in plant sciences, environmental history, ethics, environmental management, and urban design to ask: how can more-than-human ethics improve multispecies cohabitation in urban forests? The paper hypothesises that concepts of dignity and respect can underline the capabilities of nonhuman lifeforms and lead to improved designs for multispecies cohabitation. To investigate the implications of this ethical framework, we 1) indicate injustices of current management in relation to natural and cultural histories of trees; 2) outline a conceptual framework that includes large old trees as stakeholders in urban communities; and 3) use this framework in a thought experiment with urban trees in Melbourne, outlining comparative design outcomes. Our findings show that the expansion of dignity to include nonhuman life is possible and plausible. Such an extension can justify and encourage design innovation for multiple species and sites. The resulting design practices will lead to improvements by supporting communities of trees at all stages of their life-cycles, including old age, death, and rebirth. This approach requires substantial shifts in accepted thinking and practices including history, ethics, aesthetics, regulation, and education. Design can play a significant role in the necessary transitions by demonstrating tangible and positive outcomes. In this context, history emerges as an essential tool that can extend societal imagination by situating possible future places in the context of ancient and ongoing geological, evolutionary, ecological, and cultural processes.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableIntelligent Lighting Networks(Future Implied Media Architecture Biennale, event by Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, Utrecht University, and others. 24 June 2 July 2021, 2021)This project seeks to address detrimental effects of the environmental light pollution by developing intelligent lighting networks that can support nonhuman as well as human needs. The significance of this research is clear from one dramatic contradiction. On one hand, all life on the Earth has evolved to depend on darkness. Ecological evidence shows that harmful effects of light pollution are pervasive and affect all organisms, including humans. On the other hand, human societies crave more light to maximise economic activities. As a result, artificial sources of light at night are increasing by 6% every year. Codes and standards of current lighting design often fail to acknowledge the environmental impact as evident, for example, in the Australian lighting standards and local-council lighting strategies. Existing design trends do not acknowledge the needs of nonhumans or provide systems that can flexibly adapt to their behaviours. Computational analysis, simulation and interactive visualisation provide opportunities to reassess such approaches. We use these tools to ask how design can address the damaging misalignment of nonhuman needs and human preferences for light. In response, our project claims that computational analysis, simulation, and immersive digital media can combine human and nonhuman input to support better design. To test this proposition, this study 1) assesses scientific evidence on the impact of light; 2) reviews current and emerging lighting designs; 3) develops a conceptual framework for more-than-human design in application to lighting; and 4) tests this framework in a concrete design experiment that considers an intelligent lighting network for characteristic urban sites. Our results demonstrate that data-driven simulations, immersive interactive visualisations, and persistent multi-modal input systems can extend design imagination.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableForms of Sentience and Future Places(Urban Assemblage: The City as Architecture, Media, AI and Big Data, event by Architecture, Media, Politics, Society (APMS), University of Hertfordshire, Intellect Press and Parade. 28-30 June 2021, 2021)Visions of future cities differ greatly. Techno-optimists imagine greater comfort, better health, and longer lives. By contrast environmentalists foresee extinctions and the twilight of consumer civilisations. Whatever the outcome, the technological acceleration will continue to affect the lives of city dwellers, human and nonhuman. This situation calls for further research into capabilities for just resilience in the context of inclusive, more-than-human communities. The approach of this project is to review this challenge through the lens of sentience. Sentience is a contested concept that integrates ecological and technical concerns. Thus, its exploration can challenge existing anthropocentric frameworks and propose novel research directions. Existing discourse on sentience in humanities, engineering, and biological sciences is extensive but disjointed. This disunity results in the exclusion and disregard of sentient agents, existing and emerging. This is particularly apparent in the damaging anthropocentric bias of current design and engineering. In response, this project considers the roles sentience in future cities. It hypothesises that an understanding of sentience as a more-than-human, relational, and distributed phenomenon can promote interspecies justice. To test this hypothesis, we begin with an outline of biological sentience in humans, animals, and other lifeforms. We then compare biological sentience with forms technological sentience in robots and intelligent devices. The last steps of our analysis explore how these forms of sentience can combine in the context of smart cities and discuss implications for human and nonhuman stakeholders. Using project examples, we compare existing conditions, within emerging trends, and long-term forecasts. The outcomes of this review emphasise the importance of ecocentric foundation for further research into nonhuman lives and interspecies communities. Further study of interspecies communities is important as a source of learning about nonhuman subjectivity, cognition, sentience, intelligence, and knowledge that will be crucially important as contributions to the necessary design of future cities.
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ItemInterspecies Design(Cambridge University Press, 2021)Design is a distinct form of practice with a typical focus on human aspirations for products, buildings, infrastructure, urban spaces, services and land use. As such, design affects all planetary environments, societies and the capabilities of individual humans. This chapter begins by establishing design as both a force responsible for the current situation and a primary concern of the future. Next, the chapter uses cities as a characteristic example of significantly modified habitats that are simultaneously biological and cultural. The cultures within such habitats combine the behaviours and traditions of many lifeforms. Consequently, the chapter argues that design approaches to the management of future habitats – conceptualised as ‘interspecies design’ – must engage with non-human as well as human cultures. This has implications for theoretical and practical engagements with the Anthropocene, pointing to the significance of design and the need for a transformation of design practices.
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ItemSentience and Place: Towards More-than-Human Cultures(Printemps Numérique/ISEA, 2020)Expectations for the future can differ greatly. Some await a technical utopia that will support harmonious and easy lives. Others predict a global ecosystem collapse that will threaten the future of humans as species. Both camps make appeals to sentience in support of their stories. Addressing this discordance, this paper combines narratives in ecology and technology to ask what roles sentience might play in future places. In response, it hypothesizes that an understanding of sentience as an inclusive, relational and distributed phenomenon can promote more-than-human cultures and contribute to the wellbeing of heterogenous stakeholders on the Earth and beyond. To test this hypothesis, the paper outlines biological understandings of sentience (as applied especially to humans, animals and other lifeforms), contrasts them with the interpretations of sentience in artificial entities (including robots and smart buildings), gives an example of attempts at sentience in architectural design and discusses how sentience relates to place. The paper’s conclusion rejects the dualism of technophilic and biophilic positions. As an alternative, the paper outlines sentience as a foundation for richly local more-than-human cultures that have intrinsic value and can help in the search for preferable futures.
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ItemMultispecies Cohabitation and Future Design(Design Research Society, 2020)How should humans live with animals and other forms of life? Could responses to this question improve the health and wellbeing of the biosphere? This paper argues that design researchers ought to engage nonhuman lifeforms as collaborators: informants and co-designers, or clients and users. Inspired by recent design challenges involving birds, bats and trees, this paper positions emancipatory multispecies cohabitation as a goal that can alleviate ongoing biodiversity losses and human-wildlife conflicts, in cities and beyond. It opens an interdisciplinary conversation by translating emerging scholarship in ethics, politics, and aesthetics to a narrative about desirable more-than-human cultures. This discussion has significant implications and can help to inform regulation, instrumentation, and pedagogies of future design.
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ItemTowards More-than-Human Heritage: Arboreal Habitats as a Challenge for Heritage Preservation(Springer, 2020-03-25)Trees belong to humanity’s heritage, but they are more than that. Their loss, through catastrophic fires or under business-as-usual, is devastating to many forms of life. Moved by this fact, we begin with an assertion that heritage can have an active role in the design of future places. Written from within the field of architecture, this article focuses on structures that house life. Habitat features of trees and artificial replacement habitats for arboreal wildlife serve as concrete examples. Designs of such habitats need to reflect behaviours, traditions and cultures of birds, bats, and other animals. Our narrative highlights the nonhuman aspect of heritage, seeking to understand how nonhuman stakeholders can act as users and consumers of heritage and not only as its constituents. Our working definition states that more-than-human heritage encompasses tangible and intangible outcomes of historical processes that are of value to human as well as nonhuman stakeholders. From this basis, the article asks how the established notions of heritage can extend to include nonhuman concerns, artefacts, behaviours and cultures. As a possible answer to this question, the hypothesis tested here is that digital information can (1) contribute to the preservation of more-than-human heritage; and (2) illuminate its characteristics for future study and use. This article assesses the potential of three imaging technologies and considers the resulting data within the conceptual framework of more-than-human heritage, illuminating some of its concrete aspects and challenges.