THE PROCESS

STAGE 1

SITE ASSESSMENT - A “LIVING STORY”

We help you create a “place-based” design by understanding the socio-ecological system (SES) - what is here, what will nature permit us to do, what will nature help us to do. Instead of using energy to force the land to do something, we learn its natural trajectory through our unique site assessment. This improves the design’s efficiency and decreases the long-term costs.

STAGE 2 

ECOLOGICAL PERFORMANCE OPPORTUNITIES

We help you identify and unlock the natural hidden assets of your building or site. We measure existing ecological services and integrate those into the design to reduce engineering costs or to find creative ways to ensure that your design replaces ecological services such as rain retention, storm management, noise reduction, CO2 sequestering, and air purification to match the ecological performance of the site prior to construction.

STAGE 3

SUSTAINABLE AND RESILIENT DESIGN THINKING

We tend to work on big, messy problems with high uncertainty and stakes, urgent decisions, and multiple values in dispute. In resilience literature, these are called, “wicked problems”. As such, they typically don’t have a precedent for how to solve them, so we will use our expertise in biomimicry, biophilia and ecological engineering to help you find creative and sustainable strategies that can be applied to any design challenge.

STAGE 4

STRATEGIC FORESIGHT AND SCENARIO PLANNING

Design fiction is the development of believable ideas that may not (yet) be possible but that provoke a conversation of what could (should) be possible. This, combined with scenario analysis allows us to better understand the barriers and opportunities facing a client. We obtain a deeper understanding of the desirability, technical feasibility, and financial viability of multiple ideas and thus, find more efficient ways to move forward in the design process. We use this approach at multiple scales - e.g. ecosystems, masterplans, buildings and homes.

STAGE 5

BIO-INSPIRED DESIGNS

We leverage our knowledge of natural principles and our catalogue of biomimicry technologies to integrate the best bio-inspired designs into your project.