Urban Ecology and Adaptive Habitats
I believe that a natural evolution is taking place in our thinking and design. I believe that we’re shifting from an “industrial-age” towards a more sustainable, “age of biology”, which means that we are beginning to learn from nature and adopt a more natural perspective for how we could do things. It also means that we are beginning to change our language.
Urban ecologies and adaptive habitats describes a new reality of our built environments. It’s about viewing our habitats as deeply interdependent and interrelated with the ecosystem they’re embedded in. It also describes the necessary evolution of our built forms to be able to sense and respond to their environments. These two concepts are points of departure from the long-standing paradigms of separation and static control. If you look at most of our built infrastructure you can see these “thoughts” or paradigms embedded in the forms. That is, we built systems with little regard to the existing ecosystem (e.g. clear cutting, digging, and grading large landscapes) in order to fit the system to a more workable, homogeneous state for our species. We’ve physically built ourselves out of nature. And we use use lots of energy to manufacture materials that are robust and designed to resist environmental pressures like wind, rain, rivers, and solar degradation. Now that we’re separate from nature, we’ll use our power of harnessing energy to try to control her. Urban ecologies and adaptive habitats sort of turns these older ideas on their head.
Knowing that nature has been refining itself for nearly four-billion years, I fell confident in saying that it is most sustainable system on this planet. It’s learned how to thrive on this particular planet and is embedded with principles that could teach us to build sustainably as well. It just requires a shift in our thinking.
For example, I hear a lot of designs and strategies that are aiming to do “less harm” to the environment, which implies that we as a species are and always will be a pest to the rest of the natural world. And that we need to curb our impact. But what if we created things that were contributions to their environments rather than disruptions? What if we could build systems to be more adaptive, using information at multiple scales, to change and adapt to the ever-changing environment it inhabits. What if we manufactured with only a subset of the periodic table of elements, in water-based chemistry and using only body-temperature and pressure (like all of life)? What if we bridged the worlds of biology and design to inspire a new paradigm; one that is less energy intensive and more harmonious with its surroundings?
“I think the biggest innovations of the twenty-first century will be the intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning, just like the digital one when I was his age.” - Steve Jobs
Neri Oxman is a bit of champion in reframing our design lens and explains that there is a new way of “beholding the world” that challenges our early notions of “world-as-machine”. In her ground breaking work, she focuses on what she calls, “material-ecology”, which is about redefining the way we interpret materials by giving them more life-like qualities. For example, her “Vesper” project is an additive manufacturing project that can 3D print materials with varied physical properties at a finite scale. This means that a material may have different rigidity, colour, conductivity and even scent, which can change at a microscopic level.
Neri Oxman’s “Monocoque” wall. A description from her website: “Monocoque stands for a construction technique that supports structural load using an object’s external skin. Contrary to the traditional design of building skins that distinguish between internal structural frameworks and non-bearing skin elements, this approach promotes heterogeneity and differentiation of material properties.” (Source)
Within this paradigm shift, Oxman is not alone. There are architects and designers around world creating things like self-healing walls, buildings that self-assemble, skin that can clean the air, facades that open and close with moisture or light, or even buildings that “sweat” to keep cool. As we uncover more patterns of behaviour in nature, we’re leveraging emerging technologies to emulate them. And in this, we are experiencing a natural, and necessary evolution in our design thinking.
An organic façade by Prosolve 370 that is designed to clean the air, like a tree (Source: Elegant Embellishments)
A recent document published by Dell projected that 85% of the jobs that will exist in 2030, do not exist now.
In the same way we shifted from agrarian to industrial to the digital age, we are now seeing a transition into a new age of biology. But like any shift, we are also seeing a resistance to change.
Like many other species, we have an innate and common reaction to the uncertainty that comes with change: withdrawal, anxiety, heightened awareness and eventually, courageous exploration. As a species we don’t like change. And this can be especially true if we’ve become psychologically and physically embedded in a certain way of doing things for a long period of time. The longer we are stuck in a particular way of doing things, the harder it can be to adopt a new way of doing things.
This is why you see so much energy put into conserving old, established systems.
We all know that change is inevitable. And in a biological sense, change is necessary. We just may not like it (think of break-ups and death). However, change, when viewed through a lens of biology, is actually what allows us to stick around. In nature, it is through small-scale, continuous change that a system like a tree is able to adapt to its dynamic environment and survive. We can see too, that governments and businesses must continually get feedback from their environments in order to survive. But unlike these social systems, our infrastructure is more difficult to change. Including the thinking that went into them.
To change, we may actually take a page out of nature and adopt new principles that can help us better understand the principles and practices for managing change into a new era. We could learn to adopt a “biomimetic-lens” to learn how to deal with a transition towards the “Age-of-Biology”, in that we can can learn to embrace uncertainty, to innovate at smaller scales, from the bottom-up and through self-organization. A key tenant to managing systems shift is redundancy and diversity, which can be achieved through decentralization. Or, to promote a culture of experimentation to encourage small-scale releases. The following principles are a part of our Biomimicry Commons incubator studio, where we help companies, individuals, and communities adopt a biomimetic lens to support (safe) systems shifts.
These principles are derived from a new understanding of ecology and therefore, ecosystems. We are learning how nature maintains resilience and adopting some of her best ideas into our own systems. These can work in a variety of applications, including business, design, design thinking, economies, and communities.
As we move towards the new age of biology, there are some key lessons that we can take from nature. Most importantly, that it may be energy intensive and futile to resist the natural evolution of things. Yet in this transition, we can use biomimicry to better understand how to survive – and thrive – on this planet over the long haul and to challenge our fear of learning to let go of our old thinking in order to manifest designs from a new one.
