Week 05: Research

My vision for the thesis project is starting to get more clear in my head. My goal is to explore sustainability, biodesign and fabrication, in order to design and create the urban garden of the future; therefore, there’s an added layer of speculative design to my approach.

I started looking into the following topics:

1. Sustainability

2. Food production

3. Biotech and Biodesign

4. Fabrication

Although I’m researching all 4 areas simultaneously, I’m diving deeper into sustainability, since its principles will serve as a compass while I research the other areas. The first concept in sustainability that I’m investigating right now is circular economy and cradle to cradle. I watched this talk by William McDonough, and I’m inspired and fascinated by this design principles. I’m already wondering how I can apply his idea of designing buildings like a tree to my project and use biomimicry as a way to create a thriving ecosystem of biological and technological material/nutrients .

McDonough spoke to a packed audience and the event was live streamed in the Main Gallery at The Building Centre, Store Street, London on Friday 13 January 2017 Introduced by Colin Tweedy, chief executive of The Building Centre Chaired by Lewis Blackwell, curator of SuperMaterial and executive director of strategy and development at The Built Environment Trust Information on other events and recordings from The Building Centre http://www.buildingcentre.co.uk http://twitter.com/buildingcentre http://www.instagram.com/thebuildingcentre/

I also watched a talk by Neri Oxman, a biodesigner and professor at MIT. I’m fascinated by her idea of organic and generative method of fabrication, inspired by nature.

Designer and architect Neri Oxman is leading the search for ways in which digital fabrication technologies can interact with the biological world. Working at the intersection of computational design, additive manufacturing, materials engineering and synthetic biology, her lab is pioneering a new age of symbiosis between microorganisms, our bodies, our products and even our buildings.