With Designing and Living with Organisms (DLO), Svenja developed perspectives for sustainable designing and living by investigating more-than human perspectives to textile design. For three years she developed 3 different types of experiments at the Centre for Information Technology and Architecture at the Royal Danish Academy and moved her experimental house in which she would live together with the research experiments to a small farm in Hvalsø, 50km outside of Copenhagen. The project received funding from the Swedish Research Council through an international postdoc grant at the Swedish School of Textiles, University of Borås.

DLO highlights the potential of textiles and textile thinking to foster a deeper understanding and appreciation of the more-than-human world, thus contributing to more sustainable ways of designing and living. Textiles as mediators: DLO shows how textiles can connect people and nature. The project has explored textile-based artefacts that invite engagement with non-human neighbours like insects and birds, reflect the rhythms of the local ecosystem, and inspire the human neighbours to observe, contemplate, reflect, be patient, and follow up on observations. Methodological and conceptual contributions: DLO promotes a design practice that uses artefacts as inquiry tools, and employs multiple approaches and methods to explore complexity and diversity, nature’s core principles. DLO also showed how a design practice can become a personal development journey to sensitise oneself to the world of insects, and how to involve others. This has been done by creating and facilitating a community and developing the I.N.S.E.C.T. Summercamp methodology. Redefining the role of the designer: The project redefines the role of the designer. By advocating designs that invite (not force or attract) living organisms, DLO challenges the notion of designers as sole creators and controllers of a situation. Instead, it positions them as partners in a co-creative process that honours the agency, integrity, timing, seasonality and expression of the more-than-human. Fostering co-creation: DLO promotes the collective development of more-than-human design through the I.N.S.E.C.T. community and summercamps. With each camp, we refine our methods that deepen our engagement with the living environment through experimental inquiry that includes embodiment and alternative ways of knowing. A direct outcome is the VIBRA Research Network that I founded and facilitate. The network brings together researchers and practitioners from biotremology, i.e. insect vibration communication, inclusive information practices, and artistic research to connect human and non-human sensory diversity with the purpose to design more inclusive living environments for all. These outcomes collectively position the DLO project as a significant contribution to the field of design, pushing boundaries and encouraging a more ethical, inclusive and collaborative approach to designing and living with living organisms.

Three types of textile based artefacts were created and setup across the three years.

The potential of flat structures based on woven textiles and manual 3d-printing was investigated in the first year (Shearing layers of cohabitation). This was followed by a collaborative effort in the second year, resulting in the I.N.S.E.C.T. Wall Twin, an alternative insect nesting aid that combined clay 3d-printing, mycelium composite, and freeform crochet. In the third year MultispeCity comprised several textile based multi-material three-dimensional objects into a complex installation in the entrance of the experimental home that has moved from Sweden to Denmark for that purpose.

To support the practitioners and researchers exploring more-than-human perspectives to design, Svenja facilitates the annual I.N.S.E.C.T. Summercamps, now running for three years. The role of human co-creation, community building, collective inquiry and creative experimentation in developing more-than-human design methodologies became a major part of DLO. Another direct outcome of the research is the VIBRA Research Network. The network brings together researchers and practitioners from biotremology, i.e. insect vibration communication, inclusive information practices, and artistic research to connect human and non-human sensory diversity with the purpose to design more inclusive living environments for all.

Link to Designing and Living with Organisms (DLO)