designboom | architecture & design magazine

the planet is in the room: mutualism by design

what does a house look like when it is designed from the perspective of a cat? what shape does a seawall take when the client is an oyster, a garden when it is planted for a bee’s vision rather than ours, or a bridge whose only users are deer and mountain lions? in posthuman utopias, we ask what a world looks like when we stop designing on the planet, and learn to design with it. the stories ahead look at what mutualism looks like in practice: studios working with bacteria and algae as collaborators rather than materials, sensors that turn forests into something that can be listened to, buildings that are drawn to decay gracefully back into deep time rather than stand forever, new technologies turned on damage that older ones caused, and infrastructure built for, and with, animals, plants and oceans.