COLife: More-than-Human Perspective to Codesign

The aim of COLife project is to develop, test and evaluate the codesign methodologies aimed at social and environmental change for the new envisioned Post-Anthropocene era where humans and other species live together in synergy. This will be developed for urban environments through architectural building adaptations. With a more-than-human approach, we will real-life participate in codesign of an urban ecosystem through architectural prototypical urban interventions. These interventions will be both, prototyped and tested in a ‘real-life codesign laboratory’. The prototype means a design artefact that will be tested for its performance. In this case, our prototypes’ performance will focus on the creation of more-than-human habitats and edible landscapes. The real-life codesign laboratory is a non-reductionist laboratory, that integrates the complexity of real-life rather than reducing the environment into separated particles and enclosed sterile environments. The methodologies of codesigning the real-life environment will consist of 1. gigamapping – a cocreation tool for multicentred perspective with related stakeholders and community; 2. small size full-scale prototyping – realisation of the cocreated prototypes and its placement into the real-life situations on architectural buildings; 3. Community events and DIY recipes for the community engagement, thus the project becomes generative. It reproduces and thus cocreates connectivity (biocorridors) across the city; 4. Evaluation – the social and the ecosystem performance – the public engagement data statistics analysis based on social media as well as DIY recipes reproduction as well as the healthy biotopes ecosystem data (an annual ecological study). We are recently experiencing the 6th Mass Extinction. The urban environment plays a critical role in its mitigation. Many species are recently adapting to life in cities, offering them better conditions than by pesticides, herbicides, etc. poisoned agricultural land. For many species, cities are located on crucial migration paths, as they are typically founded on the rivers. Therefore, the urban ecosystem is critical to the overall biodiversity of the planet. However, our cities were not designed for such coliving situation. For generating environmental change, one needs to achieve social change and vice versa. Therefore, new approaches need to be developed in this field.

This event will take place from 16 to 17 o’clock.

Start: 15 April 2025

End: 15 April 2025