Our Artificial Nature: Design research for an era of environmental change

How must design practice embrace the tools and technologies that lie at the root of the environmental crisis as the means by which to confront it and create a better world? How must our relationship with non-human biological and technological systems change in order to create positive environmental impact, and what might this mean for the structural potentials of design research and practice?

Our Artificial Nature is a 2023 exhibition that brings together research led by core and affiliated research faculty at the Center for Green Buildings and Cities (CGBC) at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), highlighting the cultural, social, and technological processes emerging within design discourse in response to the environmental imperatives of our time. The exhibition provides a window onto the often-invisible mechanics of the built environment that allow us to see, analyze, and design our future world in new and yet-unimagined ways. As a collective body of work, the show explores the challenging space between empirical and cultural information, scalable systems and local relevance, and data and design.

Our Artificial Nature foregrounds design’s role in the creation of the artificial and the imagining of our constructed environment in a moment when our designed and natural worlds are fused, and in which the media of world-building oscillates between the physical and digital. In this context, the built environment accounts for nearly 40% of global energy use and related CO2 emissions,* and our concept of environmental change is shifting from one based on a human-nature binary—a bucolic organic system to be dominated or restored by means of human intervention—toward one based on an entangled system of biological, cultural, and technological relationships. This quiet, hopeful thread of design research emerges from a multiplicity of 21st century design narratives, though is often seen to be at odds with dominant modes of design discourse that privilege the role of form and artifact, or the physical, static manifestation of a particular design. It is an optimistic body of work that strives for positive and practical environmental impact and that points to hope rather than fear from and reactivity to crisis. It addresses the present ecological paradigm by embracing degrowth as much as growth, and it considers the role of social process and computation to be as important as that of form and artifact in the deployment of design for the meaningful transformation of our human and non-human world.

The exhibition aims to situate the emerging research within a history of design for environmental change and to solidify a dialogue around a new paradigm for environmental design. Positioned outside the framework of technological optimism and pessimism, Our Artificial Nature showcases the role of the designer as creator of our synthetic world through the design of processes, artifacts, and environments that are continuously changing due to networked structures of human and non-human communication—from grounded, situated, and analog systems of knowledge to artificial intelligence and data-rich systems of information.

The exhibition is organized into three themes, across which a narrative of emerging design research unfolds. The themes described in the exhibition pamphlet also provide a provocation for the future of design practice, which can and must change in order to functionally encounter the environmental, technological, and social realities of our moment. Within each theme lies a clear recommendation for action with respect to the structural potentials of design practice, the changing scopes of work it must embrace, and the tactics it may utilize to shape a meaningful and deeply hybrid world through design agency and leadership.

Download the Exhibition Pamphlet

Curation and Exhibition Design

  • Elizabeth Bowie Christoforetti

Curatorial and Design Assistant

  • Pablo Castillo Luna

Researchers

  • Clara He
  • Ana Merla
  • Dhruv Mehta
  • Kat Wyatt

Output

Our Artificial Nature: Design Research for an Era of Environmental Change. Curation and Exhibition Design, Gund Hall, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Fall 2024.

Christoforetti, Elizabeth. Our Artificial Nature exhibition essay and pamphlet. Harvard GSD Exhibitions Department, 2024.

Christoforetti, Elizabeth Bowie and Chan, Carson. “Our Artificial Nature: Perspectives on Design for an Era of Environmental Change.” Harvard GSD Public Lecture Series, Fall 2023. Cambridge, MA. 

Christoforetti, Elizabeth Bowie. “Agency, Complexity, and Design Practice in an Era of Scalable Systems.” Agency: Atmosphere 16 Conference, Spring 2024. Manitoba, Canada.

Christoforetti, Elizabeth Bowie. “Our Artificial Nature: Emerging Practices of the Built Environment.” IED (Instituto Europeo di Design)Turin Interdisciplinary Design Degree Lecture Series, Spring 2024. Turin, Italy.

Photo credit to Pablo Castillo Luna and the Harvard GSD Exhibitions Team