Biodesign in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Biodesign in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Deep Green investigates the potential of nature-based technology for shaping the evolution of contemporary architecture and design. It takes on the now pervasive topic of design intelligence, extending its definition to encompass both biological and digital realms.

As in their first title, Systemic Architecture: Operating Manual for the Self-Organizing City, the authors engage the topic through the specific lens of their innovative design practice, ecoLogicStudio, and their research at the University of Innsbruck and at the Bartlett, UCL. Part One of the book, entitled PhotoSynthetica (TM), illustrates design solutions that engage the urban microbiome and seek to achieve an immediate impact, while Part Two, entitled Deep Green, includes synthetic landscapes and operates within a much larger spatio-temporal frame, going beyond human perception and life span to envision design as a geographical and geological force.

In the age of catastrophic climate change, such perceptual expansion helps to clarify that change cannot simply be stopped or rolled back. We must instead establish more positive dynamics of change within the living world. To this end, this book proposes to engage with design and architecture as an extended cognitive interface, a sentient being that is co-evolutionary and symbiotic with the living planet, contributing to its beauty and to our continued enjoyment of it.