The article explores how the quality of life within a deprived urban environment might be improved through the ‘gamification’ of and interaction with, more-than-human elements within the environment. It argues that such quality may be achieved through the community’s multicentered value from the bottom up. This is shown through the case study of the Co-De|GT urban mobile application that was developed in the Synergetic Landscapes unit through real-life research by design experimental studio teaching. Complimentary experimentation took place during the Relating Systems Thinking and Design 10 symposium in the Co-De|BP workshop, where experts were able to be collocated for interactive real-time data gathering. This application addresses the need for collective action towards more-than-human synergy across an urban ecosystem through gamification, community collaboration and DIY culture. It intends to generate a sustainable, scalable token economy where humans and non-humans play equal roles, earning, trading and being paid for goods and services to test such potentials for future economies underpinned by blockchain. This work diverges from dominant economic models that do not recognise the performance of and the limits to, material extraction from the ecosystem. The current economic model has led to the global financial crisis (GFC). Furthermore, it is based on the unsustainable perpetual consumption of services and goods, which may lead to the untangling and critical failure of the market system globally. Therefore, this work investigates how gamification and tokenization may support a complementary and parallel economic market that sustains and grows urban ecosystems. While the research does not speculate on policy implications, it posits how such markets may ameliorate some of the brittleness apparent in the global economic model. It demonstrates a systemic approach to urban ecosystem performance for the future post-Anthropocene communities and economies.

While many studies were done about green facades’ thermal performance, limited studies were done about green facades for productive farming. Most focused only on one facade or building. According to that, this research questioned what the potentials of farming on facades and roofs in an entire neighbourhood are and what could such a farming system looks like, and what it costs. To address these questions, a literature review about urban farming and possible crops was done. A neighbourhood of 22 multi-floor residential buildings in Nablus\Palestine, was chosen as a case study, and two parametric tools, one for analysis (AGRI|gen\Analysis) and another for design (AGRI|gen\design) were developed and implemented. The study found that in the chosen neighbourhood, existing facades can provide about 28,500 m² of farming area, but only half of the facades and all of the roofs were suitable for daylight-based farming. Tomatoes and cucumbers can be farmed on 25% and 33% of the facades, respectively, to fulfil about 350% and 237% of tomatoes and cucumbers consumption by the same neighbourhood simultaneously. Roofs were found to be more suitable for high DLI-requiring plants like sweet peppers as they can produce more than 315 times the local consumption. In terms of design, a modular adaptive facade system was designed to fit the neighbourhood to enhance the farming possibilities. The facade system needed about 40,824 modular units of which 73.3%, 10.1%, 8.7%, and 8% of them were LED, PV, Sensor, and fan units respectively, with an average system cost of about $55.2\m² and a total cost of $1.7M. Finally, a comparison between the system and a proposed vertical farm building in the same region was done, and then related recommendations by the researcher were suggested. This research highlights the potential for productive farming on facades and roofs, which could contribute to sustainable and resilient cities.

The mission of the present trans-disciplinary community environmental project COLridor (Davidová, 2017b) is to generate a situation of eco-systemic co-living across local species’ and abiotic agency in an urban environment through their co-design. Located in the city centre of Prague, the case study bio-tope is a part of larger bio-corridor that has evolved namely thanks to the adjacent railway and water stream. Though the prevailing opinion of European urbanists stays that cities should remain dense and separate from the rest of nature, landscape ecologists and biologists tend to disagree. There is no nature on Earth without human beings and these together evolved reflecting each other’s impact and interaction. A great variety of species have adapted and evolved for the urban environment that, at the moment for many, offers safer and more habitable living environment than agricultural land full of herbicides, pests, antibiotics and antibiotics resistant bacteria. Through systematically co-designed and co-created so called eco-systemic ‘prototypical urban interventions’ (Doherty, 2005), the project aims to motivate generation of edible landscape, social, cultural and habitable urban environment across the species. We claim that designers should be no longer designing for- but designing with- the overall eco-system. This case study helps to justify first author’s ratified design field Systemic Approach to Architectural Performance, covering fusion of variety of co-design across eco-system in process based fields. This is an extended, edited and updated article based on a working paper ‘COLridor: Co-Design and Co-Living for Sustainable Futures’ (Davidová & Zímová, 2017) for Relating Systems Thinking and Design 6 conference within the theme ‘Environment, Economy, Democracy: Flourishing Together’ (Sevaldson, 2017).

This article integrates a series of diverse projects that together exemplify and interpret the Systemic Approach to Architectural Performance (SAAP) that has been developed by the author. SAAP is a fusion of several process-based fields and their media and agency, namely: a) Systems oriented design; b) Performance oriented architecture; 3) Prototypical urban interventions; d) Time-based design; e) Service design; and f) Co-design, co-creation and DIY. The article presents SAAP’s relations to these fields and concludes with their integration and synergy in a ‘Real Life Co-Design Laboratory’, where collaborative and collective processes are seen as the resulting design objects or rather, objectives.

First-hand experiences in several design projects that were based on media richness and collaboration are described in this article. Although complex design processes are merely considered as socio-technical systems, they are deeply involved with natural systems. My collaborative research in the field of performance-oriented design combines digital and physical conceptual sketches, simulations and prototyping. GIGA-mapping - is applied to organise the data. The design process uses the most suitable tools, for the subtasks at hand, and the use of media is mixed according to particular requirements. These tools include digital and physical GIGA-mapping, parametric computer aided design (CAD), digital simulation of analyses, as well as sampling and 1:1 prototyping. Also discussed in this article are the methodologies used in several design projects to strategize these tools and the developments and trends in the tools employed. The paper argues that the digital tools tend to produce similar results through given pre-sets that often do not correspond to real needs. Thus, there is a significant need for mixed methods including prototyping in the creative design process. Media mixing and cooperation across disciplines is unavoidable in the holistic approach to contemporary design. This includes the consideration of diverse biotic and abiotic agents. I argue that physical and digital GIGA-mapping is a crucial tool to use in coping with this complexity. Furthermore, I propose the integration of physical and digital outputs in one GIGA-map and the participation and co-design of biotic and abiotic agents into one rich design research space, which is resulting in an ever-evolving research-design process-result time-based design.

The research’s main objective is to explore and encourage modes of architectural practice that can foster multispecies co-living to reduce biodiversity loss and increase the quality of life for both human and nonhuman inhabitants of architecture. This is achieved through conceptual discussions, comprehensive architectural case studies and work-based design explorations that support cross-species co-living in the context of Eastern Norway (Østlandet)—a geographical region of south-eastern Norway consisting of the counties Vestfold, Telemark, Viken, Oslo and Innlandet. A pluralistic method builds on analytical, critical and work-based explorative studies consisting of two parts: (a) historical and contemporary case studies in Norway that support modes of cross-species co-living and (b) design explorations by the second author investigating the operational potential of kindness in architecture. The notion of kindness in this research is built upon an understanding of the amalgam of concepts: solidarity, kinship and being kind, explained in the article’s introduction. The potential for designing with and for nonhumans to reinvigorate modes of co-living and support existing habitats is investigated, focusing on the ways three bird species relate to a specific building in Eastern Norway due to their habitat needs in the region: Cyanistes caeruleus, Eurasian blue tit (blåmeis in Norwegian); Passer montanus, Eurasian tree sparrow (pilfink in Norwegian); and Delichon urbicum, northern or common house martin (taksvale in Norwegian). The research contributes to ongoing discussions within architectural discourse regarding multispecies inhabitation and architecture’s role in the current biodiversity crisis and provides insight into both historical and contemporary/ongoing design solutions for multispecies co-living.