Collaborating with nature: Towards symbiotic design

            In 1985 Donna Haraway stated that we are all cyborgs (Haraway:1985); later she shifts to another level of hybridity: one of companion species and symbionts.(Haraway:2003) (Haraway:2016) The notion of purity is long-forgotten; today, more than ever, it is clear that everything in our world is composed, hybrid, homogeneous or heterogeneous, depending on the point of view. Bruno Latour finds the question whether the world is composed or not irrelevant; in his ‘An Attempt at a “Compositionist Manifesto” ’ he delivers a more important question – is the world “well” or “badly” composed? (Latour:2010)

            The great thinkers usually think ahead of their time; while Haraway foresees the new type of hybrid creatures – the symbiotic beings, we are still cyborgs in many ways. For instance, we might not have technologies embedded in our bodies, but we all consume the products of the monstrous cyborg manufacturing machine that merges production technologies and human workers.

            Where did it all start? Eventhough the term “cyborg” is relatively new, from the dawn of humanity there was an interest of enhancing our world and eventually our bodies. In mythology there are numerous examples of creatures ‘composed’ by combining human and animal parts, e.g. gods in the Egyptian mythology. Parallel with this there were myths of creating entirely new ‘life’ such as the first automaton Talos. (TED:2019) The inspiration to create life was always there and maybe someday it will become reality – meaning that robots will be not just robots, but truly alive, for it was also the dream of Pinocchio (and many others). The ultimate zeal of life is the creation of life.

            Today we almost have the technologies for the implementation of this final aim. And yet, in the ubiquotous reality of the cyborg, we realise that having advanced tools to create and using them inappropriately has led us to a nearly anti-utopian reality. Somewhere on our path to becoming almighty creators we must have got it terribly wrong. The times had past in which we worshiped the cyborg as a culmination of our creation skills. There is an urgent need to re-think how we design the world and to re-compose it more skillfully and wisely if we have the ambition to survive.

            In our current state of consciousness we are used to think that we can create new life by extracting life from life, materials from nature; and now there is a need for a new paradigm. The cyborg is a combination of human body and machinery parts, which are created by extracting metals from the Mother Earth and re-working them. This is more or less the case with anything we create – taking and taking from nature. But this cyborg is far more from this. The cyborg is even more than the entire unsustainable human production mass; it is a mode of world-perception and egoistic mind.

            We need to start creating together with nature. Not taking, but borrowing from and collaborating with it – designing materials, products and processes which are sustainable, working together with it towards better solutions. Before we start working together, we must also realise what does it mean that we live together.            

Studio Libertiny

            The main theme of the 17th Venice Biennale of Architecture – “How will we live together?” – was studied in micro themes. One of them, “Among Diverse Beings”, focused on “new forms of interaction among individuals and between individuals and other species” as an answer to the today’s “growing individualism, resulting in further isolation.” (La Biennale di Venezia:2021) This individualism is a paradoxal concequence of the ‘cyborg’ paradigm: the hybridity not only in the fields of design, but in the today’s production processes and consumption chains leads instead of unity to separation not only between individuals, but also between man and nature.

            An intriguing alternative could be to create together with other species, such as bees. During the 17th Venice Biennale of Architecture, Studio Libertiny presented the concept of using (such an akward word! We need to stop using nature, we must start involving nature), of involving bees in the process of prototyping for architecture. Bees are widely known as natural architects and might be nature’s most sustainable: they use entirely their own material – beeswax, produced by their own bodies; they create perfect patterns and shapes – the honeycomb is regarded as one of the most stable patterns for weight support.

            “The bees act together as a swarm and perform multiple and very complex architectural computations including measuring temperature, tensions, and structural load and size, given the constraints of local weather, the size of the beehive, and overall richness of the surrounding area.” (La Biennale di Venezia:2021) Because bees use their own material, which they produce in limited quantities, they have to construct very economicaly. If there is a need to prototype a stable yet light construction, bees might respond to the challenge better than artificial intelligence could do today.

            One interesting aspect of the bees’ architectural work is that they “act together as a swarm”. (La Biennale di Venezia:2021) This might be comparable with a design, which combines the work of a group of architects and with a fabrication by multi-handed robot. A valuable lesson we can learn is the unifying of multiple points of view in a single design, which is how bees do their teamwork.

            Studio Libertiny exhibited several complex geometric forms, including the shape of the Bust of Nefertiti, in the sizes of approximately half a meter, which are constructed out of a simple wire framework, covered by an outer layer of beehive structure. The outer layer is entirely created by bees out of beeswax. The building process can take “from several weeks to a couple of years”. (La Biennale di Venezia:2021) The authors propose that these small-scale prototypes can “be scanned using Computer Tomography and fabricated and assembled in segments at a different scale and with different material” (La Biennale di Venezia:2021)

            The process of creating together with bees is an admiration and worshiping of nature. For today’s industry standarts it might be a rather slow one, but maybe we also need to slow down. This will be “Only in using this back-and-forth process between nature and technology informing each other can humans remain in balance with their surrounding environment. In this, perhaps, lies an answer to how we might live together.” (La Biennale di Venezia:2021)

            Another paradox is that the long-dreamt-of-progress, achieved by our 'cyborg-isation', turns out to be, in fact, regress. According to Latour, “we had to move from an idea of inevitable progress to one of tentative and precautionary progression”. (Latour:2010) There is a crucial difference between the progress as an event and the progress is process. The industrial ‘progress’ has left us in the ruins of nature; we need to re-design the process of our future progress, if we really want it to be progress.