NetWall is a pioneering project focused on creating sustainable urban habitats through the development of biocorridors, leveraging collaborative design involving both human and non-human stakeholders. It integrates several time-based feedback looping lessons learned from the previous experiments on more-than-human interventions in urban environments. It is developed in different levels of more-than-human codesign. In the first stage, the ecosystem is represented by human stakeholders through gigamapping and prototyping with their combination. However, then the ecosystem is intervened by the initial codesigned prototype to be codesigned with the overall ecosystem, humans included. This includes insects, bats and bird habitation as well as humans reproducing DIY recipes for such habitats or seed bombing events. This is what the first author calls the Real Life CoDesign Laboratory, and that is when the most real-life participation takes place. The codesign methods here are multilayered, and this presentation is a methodological paper in its basis.
Further, this intervention uses the first author’s research on responsive solid wood to generate biodiverse climates to support diverse habitats. This is caused by different wood properties when cut in tangential sections from various placements of the tree trunk. The cut plates then warp by a variety of properties and generate a diversity of singular cell chambers.
The lessons learned from the previous prototypes suggest that generating such diversity with responsive wood is beneficial. However, it is also beneficial to separate single cells, as many species don’t want to live near each other.
This WIP project will be followed by the installation gamification in the next semester, which will follow after this winter semester of studio teaching at the University of Stuttgart.
KEYWORDS: more-than-human, gigamapping, prototyping, systems oriented design, systemic approach to architectural performance, real-life codesign laboratory, gamification
Originally published for the RSD13 Symposium
