About

Barn swallows are a familiar yet declining sight, their nests disappearing along with the barns they once relied on. Bird+House is a nesting project finding space for biodiversity within an expanding human footprint. Rather than finished nests, we 3D-print scaffolds from local biomaterials — open structures placed at safer sites that invite the birds to finish the form themselves. The project is a cross-disciplinary study of ecological restoration and a new interspecies design language to build public awareness and empathy.

Wetland environments, especially those occurring at the interface of land and sea, foster the proliferation of life at every scale. Many of these landscapes have been degraded by extractive agriculture practices in recent centuries; however, they can be regenerated through the techniques of restoration ecology informed by contemporary sensing networks. For over a decade, the MIT Media Lab’s Responsive Environments Group (ResEnv) has been collecting critical environmental data from a custom sensing infrastructure installed across a post-industrial cranberry bog in south-eastern Massachusetts. Now, the ResEnv team is re-designing the sensor node to be more responsive to the specific needs of the soil scientists they support and to improve environmental robustness. Through a new collaboration with Tour du Valat, sparked by the MIT-LUMA lab, they are also designing a novel salinity sensor for wetland monitoring and coastal restoration efforts taking place in the Camargue.

Guided Growth explores how diverse knit architectures can facilitate and guide rooted plant growth in landscapes requiring regeneration, including river banks, slopes, and deforested or degraded terrain. The project proposes functionally graded 3D knitted geotextiles as biodegradable scaffolds deployed on vulnerable sites to stabilize seedlings while influencing soil and sediment dynamics. By integrating biodegradable materials and diverse knit structures, the project creates a soft framework for plants to take root, gently stabilizing the site while supporting the long-term regeneration of the landscape.

Living Walls is a collaborative research project by Nof Nathansohn and Rafi Segal, based on Nof’s ongoing research and design work on 3D soil & seed printing. The project explores the integration of living systems into architectural construction by developing a new type of dry-wet hybrid building block that combines ceramic and soil 3D printing. The ceramic component forms a durable dry building block while the soil part - made with locally sourced soil, fibers, and seeds - transforms the exterior part of the wall into a living facade of plant growth. As such biological processes are introduced as an integrated part of construction, opening new possibilities for architecture that actively contributes to our eco-systems.

Self-Assembly Lab and Atelier LUMA are collaborating on next-generation, all-natural technical textiles. The project combines the Self-Assembly Lab's expertise in material programming and knit construction with Atelier LUMA's work in bioregional and regenerative materials. Across various bioregions, natural materials in combination with advanced textile construction methods can deliver highly desired performance qualities without relying on synthetic materials. The partnership aims to rethink what high performance truly means through an ecological lens.

REEF transforms retired New England sailcloth through collective hand-cutting into porous textiles that can become cloaks, canopies, and performance structures. Participants trace oyster shells directly onto a shared surface, creating a pattern that no one fully designs and no machine could reproduce in exactly the same way. As people work from the edges toward the center, they encounter and continue one another’s decisions. The project tests whether technical inefficiency can enable social efficacy, using artistic making as a method to investigate how discarded materials, shared labor, ecological attention, and new forms of value can be recomposed together.

Can architecture be grown from ecological waste and become an active participant in environmental regeneration? This project reimagines the built environment as a living interface that filters, exchanges, and responds to its surroundings. By transforming excess seaweed into high-performance nanofibrous materials through electrospinning, and drawing inspiration from the porous structures of marine radiolaria, the research explores how biology, advanced fabrication, and architecture can converge to create regenerative material systems.

Composer Tod Machover brings Richard Powers’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Overstory to operatic life. Both a hymn to the life of trees and a passionate appeal to environmental consciousness and activism, the production—directed by Jay Scheib, with a libretto by Simon Robson—will be musically transportive, technologically groundbreaking, scenically immersive, and dramatically thrilling. Developed through Machover’s Opera of the Future group at the MIT Media Lab, the project integrates music, immersive performance, AI-assisted technologies, environmental design, and biological and material research to bring the hidden life of trees—and our interdependence with them—into an immediate, shared experience.

Vivre en [Flamant] Rose | Living as Flamingo is a fable in DESIGN EARTH’s Elephant in the Room series. Taking the Greater Flamingo as an unruly emblem of the Camargue, the project follows the Rhône delta across nest earthworks, salt pans, rice fields, conservation infrastructures, tourist imaginaries, and Mediterranean flyways. The project unfolds as a long drawing scroll, a six-minute bilingual animation, and a graphic novel with rhyming text, accompanied by a media archive of approximately 150 images. Together, these materials situate the fable within histories of technology and the environment, colonialism, labor, leisure, philanthropy, ecological grief, and survival.

WoodSpray develops a biodegradable construction system derived from wood waste generated through logging and sawmilling. By combining sawdust and other wood byproducts with bio-based binders such as lignin and nanocellulose, the project formulates a sprayable, carbon-storing paste capable of replacing cement and petrochemical composites in architectural applications.