Abstract
‘Designing and Living with Organisms (DLO)’ aims to develop perspectives for sustainable ways of designing and living by questioning the separation of humans and nature in the way we design, build, and live in our homes. Reinstating this connections will provide the knowledge required to design and live more sustainably. The ongoing negative trends in biodiversity are one of the most critical of all the sustainability crises and are projected to continue or worsen in many future scenarios. However, today urban spaces attract more wildlife and living organisms such as algae, fungi, plants, and bacteria are increasingly used to manufacture novel materials for design and architecture to shift towards sustainability. In this context, textiles propose to work with space and organisms in new ways. With this artistic research project, I want to investigate how textiles can host e.g. plants and insects, and how their presence in everyday life influences the design practice and ways of life. Therefore the fields of textile and architecture will connect through designing and manufacturing structures at the Swedish School of Textiles, University of Borås and at the Centre for Information Technology and Architecture, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation in Copenhagen. Biocomposites from e.g. sand, soil, and wood are 3Dprinted on textiles from natural materials, e.g. linnen with which plants and insects can interact. The structures will be installed and lived with in my house prototype ‘Petersilie’. As a result, DLO will propose alternatives to how we design and live today and aims to provoke discussion with society, academia, and industry.