Sustainable design in southern urban natural spaces - 3D printing in Puerto Williams FONDART project, funded by the Ministry of Culture, Arts, and Heritage, Chile seeks to recover and enhance urban natural spaces in Puerto Williams, Chile through an experimental sustainable design installation. Using local clay and native mosses, the project generates public interventions that foster environmental awareness and the integration of biodiversity into the urban environment.

In response to the disconnection between humans and nature, this project adopts a non-anthropocentric approach, promoting multispecies design practices that prioritize ecological regeneration and resilience. Through biodegradable materials and collaborative processes, the initiative invites reflection on our interactions with the landscape and the importance of urban planning in harmony with native ecosystems.

Sustainable Design, a Tool for the Valorization of Natural Heritage Value Areas in the Southernmost Town in Austral Patagonia, Chile, seeks to contribute to the field of local and environmental material sustainability. The research focused on the development of a sustainable, informative urban structure-installation using Magellanic mosses and local soil, combining 3D clay printing and biology.

They won third place in the Best Paper Award at the FAB16 Montreal conference.

FAB24, Puebla, Mexico - Online Exhibition The main focus of this project is to study, speculate and prototype the relationship between the elements that make up a g-code and the optimal conditions for the proliferation of vascular and non-vascular photosynthetic organisms. By employing algorithmic design sculpting and 3D printing with compostable materials, the translucency, shape and permeability of structures are studied in order to be capable of storing and augmenting plant life.

A sculptural metaphor for the adaptive capacity of species in the face of systems hostile to life. This work seeks to express, through design, hope and faith in the resilience of living systems in the face of constant change.

MAVI UC Young Art Award 2022 - Artist: Tomás Espinosa and Sofía Mateu

Urban Syntropy is a practice-based research project that explores Nature as a co-designer in urban interventions, integrating art, technology, and ecology to create modular, living sculptures informed by site-specific environmental data. Using the [3D.D.2.LS.S] parametric design system and dataSpore, an environmental sensing device, the project translates data on soil moisture, temperature, and light into adaptive 3D-printed sculptures that serve as evolving microclimate habitats for mosses and local species. Through a Participatory Action Research (PAR) methodology, Urban Syntropy engages both communities and non-human entities in the design and care of these interventions, challenging conventional urban design paradigms. The project envisions cities as dynamic ecosystems where Nature actively participates in shaping the built environment, fostering ecological symbiosis and resilience. This proyect was part of an MRes Creative Computing thesis and the ante-proyecto for “Sintropía Urbana”

Sintropia Urbana speculates on the relationship between humanity, Nature, and technology through its notion of sensors, responding with a journey of nine sculptures that invites the public to discover the microworlds of the Cousiño Palace’s backyard. During the exhibition, these structures will transform in accordance with the seasons, establishing a crossover between the recording of environmental data and the natural proliferation of the species that inhabit them. In this way, it creates a calm dialogue between the city and its ecosystem, fostering environmental regeneration and our connection with Nature through research, technology, and art.

Nebulous Narratives seeks to navigate the dimensions of knowledge, practice, and power through the creation of an unconventional dataset, reimagining the role data plays in our interaction with the environment through a series of participatory and creative workshops that act as a vessel to encoding people’s narratives and creative reinterpretations of Nature. The project locates its focus on the ephemeral and often unpredictable movements of clouds as a case study, a domain where Nature’s vastness eludes the tight grasp of human control, presenting an opportunity to re-envision data representation and reinterpretation, where humans are almost always just recipients and not manipulators of the Natural. Exhibited in:

This project seeks to encourage the creation and construction of living spaces to be linked to the locality in question, and everything it entails (people, society and culture, species, geo-climatic conditions, materiality, and temporality). Through the creation of a low-cost, democratized, and widely disseminated “machina,” anyone in the world can create modules with their local soil, adaptable to the needs of the plant species and their respective pollinators.

What’s Around Design? (WAD?) Conference Portimao, Portugal

Temporary Encounters - Calcareo invites us to explore the collaboration between materials and technologies through an open and uncontrolled relationship, where the potential of the material is discovered in interaction with analog and digital tools. The works invite experimentation and reflection on programmed organicity and material transformation in symbiosis with technology. Programmed Organicity reveals material de(re)formation as a creative discovery, while Specimen #001 and Specimen #002 reinterpret materiality from a dialogic and open approach. This sensorial and conceptual exploration proposes new ways of understanding the relationship between matter, technology, and conscious creation.

Maceta nodriza is a material experimentation using Polylactic Acid in 3D printing. It studies the photosynthetic capacity of autotrophic organisms present in substrates and their interaction with translucent containers. Its form responds to organic shapes found in nature and aims for optimal root development and drainage for plant individuals.

A compilation of terrariums and life containers. An experimentation between digital fabrication and the establishment of autotrophic organisms such as mosses, liverworts, and small plants.

Jardines verticales