catalogue

A forest simulation proposal that lets users explore datasets where urban forest entities can hold conflicting perspectives, making trade‑offs, relations, and complexity visible in the data.

This agent-based model approach creates a system where data conflicts are deliberately emphasized, not avoided. However, rather than focusing on individual metrics as is often the case, this proposal foregrounds relational understandings of forest ecosystems

This idea investigates the performative dimensions of interfaces and can ultimately inform decisions on how to negotiate different trade-offs in urban planning.

Read more about this project in this open access paper:
Giaccardi, E., Nam, S., & Nicenboim, I. (2025). Diffractive Interfaces: Facilitating Agential Cuts in Forest Data Across More-than-human Scales. Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference, 135–147. https://doi.org/10.1145/3715336.3735404

Images cited from the paper

Through a one-month iterative design process, I used the medium of a printed trifold brochure to demonstrate how vital design principles can become included.

After experimenting with different plant illustrations for the front cover, the final design brings nature’s vitality and imperfection into the foreground through a manually inked leaf stamp of a white mulberry tree leaf found in the Massachusetts area where I live.

Moving between many different icon-designs to convey the key stakeholders involved in this research, I landed on the theme of stones to convey the slow material processes through which ecosystem entities are shaped by their surroundings. Different rock types here signal the weight that key stakeholders must carry in design, and their ability to shape and be shaped within ecosystems. The digital scan of the hand drawn illustrations emphasizes the manual brush strokes that reveals their creation process.

To further highlight biodiversity’s unpredictable responses, and to connect to physical paper as a natural, fibrous material, I used a custom paper stamp to interrupt the brochure’s standard reading flow. Here, a group of aphids, only known as data-deficient entities in digital spaces, shape reading practices to challenge existing approaches to information sharing.

Images: M Westerlaken

This tool is informed by pollinator data that relates different pollinator and plant species together to plot a garden patch that can support the highest pollinator diversity for a specific location. This is not just a digital tool, because these gardens are then also planted by people. In this set up the entire local ecosystem, including the pollinators, can respond back to the gardens, shaping and changing the ways the ecosystem unfolds.

This tool informs very practical decision-making on what species to plant, based on pollinator data. But it then also invites response from the ecosystem in real gardens across the world.

This video interview with Ginsberg and Obrist includes much more details about what happened after the gardens were planted in London: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX-mk5otbVc

Read more on the project website:

Screenshots cited from the project website (A.D. Ginsberg)

The Tšombiach (or Chumbe) weaving of the Kamëntŝa Indigenous people in Colombia depict belt patterns that tell biological cycles, for instance about harvests, sowing, and lunar phases, weaving ecological knowledge into tangible artifacts. What if such ways of narrating data can become the inspiration for new digital systems?

Such designs could inspire rethinking what ecological data involves and how it relates to peoples’ lived experiences. Biodiversity data thereby moves from a focus on only identifying species towards metaphors depicting deeply felt human relations with the land and its multispecies inhabitants.

Read more about inter-weaving knowledge practices in this open access design research paper, written by Susana Patricia Chicunque Agreda, Eliana Sánchez-Aldana, Alexandra Cuarán Jamioy, and Andrea Botero:

SP Chicunque Agreda, E Sánchez-Aldana, A Cuarán Jamioy, A Botero. (2024). Inter-weavings of Practice and Research in the Tšombiach (Woven Sashes) of the Kamëntŝa Biya People, Research in Arts and Education, 1, 178-191. https://doi.org/10.54916/rae.142607

Images cited from the paper

As part of a six-month fieldwork period about digital biodiversity data at Ecodorp Boekel, NL, this data portal was developed to bring digital data into the physical space that is the subject of monitoring for restoration. The two-hectare sight is located in a semi-urban area where biodiversity restoration involves complex socio-political and ecological dynamics. The eco-minded community grapples with high-intensity neighborhood farms, nitrogen emissions, pollution, and adjacent forest land.

As a wordplay on Digital Twins, the Digital Kins installation made such complex dynamics visible and includes 101 QR-coded data points, each hanging from 4 meter-long ropes, connected to the conical ceiling. Through different workshops, the interactive design encouraged participants to explore, categorize, discuss, expand, and question the meaning and usefulness of data practices.

An open access paper on this work is published in CSCW and translates findings into recommendations for designing biodiversity data technologies.

Westerlaken, M. (2025). Designing Biodiversity Systems via Digital Kinships: Insights from Community Data Processes and Creative Practice, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 34, 835-869. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-025-09524-2

Many of these insights subsequently inspired the Design Brief.

Images: M. Westerlaken

The biodiversity credit market is rapidly expanding with redefined units of nature, certification bodies, credit brokers, and technology-centered proposals. Savimbo aims to reshape extractivist conservation economies by inviting small farmers and Indigenous groups who guard primary forests to participate in this market. Monitoring technologies such as camera trapping are then used to support credit verification through indicator species.

While continuing to protect the livelihoods of local communities, how could this project be developed further to inspire economic principles that are more responsive to ecosystems? For example, how can the non-monetary and non-quantifiable aspects of this project become part of a business case that is not expressed through money but through ecosystem values such as cooperation, synergy, and mutual thriving? Thinking through such questions creatively with this Design Brief might inspire new collaborative proposals.

Read more about this project: https://www.savimbo.com/

Screenshots cited from the project website (Savimbo, Image: Douglas Gayeton)

"The talk traces how artificial intelligence operates as a “relational technology of life". The talk proposes the concept of Bio-AI, with Artificial Intelligence understood not just as an external computational network but as a relational technology of life that modulates its biological and social aspects. The talk closes with a modest proposal for an ethics of digital ecologies: an idea that pursues more equitable forms of coexistence for various beings across different media-ecological niches."

This exploration of aesthetics in digital ecologies fits well with the aesthetics outline of the Design Brief.

"Joanna Zylinska is a writer, artist, curator and Professor of Media Philosophy + Critical Digital Practice at King’s College London. She is an author of a number of books, including The Perception Machine (2023), AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams (2020) and The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse (2018). An advocate of “radical open-access,” she is a Co-Director of Open Humanities Press. Her art practice involves experimenting with different kinds of image based media. Zylinska is currently researching perception and cognition as boundary zones between human and machine intelligence, while trying to map out scenarios for alternative futures."

The lecture also mentions work of Refik Anadol, Anna Ridler, Mat Collishaw, and Teresa Castro that are interesting sources in the search for the Vital Aesthetics of biodiversity data.