Nature: Collaborations in Design: Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial

How designers are collaborating with scientists and ultimately with nature itself

Designers today are striving to transform our relationship with the natural world. Although humans are intrinsically linked to nature, our actions have frayed this relationship, forcing designers to think more intentionally and to consider the impact of every design decision, from an artifact's manufacture and use to its obsolescence. As a result, designers are aligning with biologists, engineers, agriculturists, environmentalists and many other specialists to design a more harmonious and regenerative future. Based on these new partnerships, designers are asking different questions and anticipating future challenges, which not only change the design process, but also what design means.
Nature: Collaborations in Design―companion to an exhibition titled Nature―Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial, Co-organized with Cube design museum―includes over 65 international projects from the fields of architecture, product design, landscape design, fashion, interactive and communication design, and material research. More than 300 compelling and exquisite photographs, illustrations and content from data visualizations illustrate seven essays, which explain and explore designers' strategies around understanding, simulating, salvaging, facilitating, augmenting, remediating and nurturing nature. Four conversations between scientists and designers delve into topics related to synthetic biology, scientific versus design lexicon and recent shifts in the meaning of nature with a glossary illuminating scientific, technological and theoretical concepts and processes invoked by the designers.
Projects include DnA_Design and Architecture's Bamboo Theater; Open Agriculture Initiative's Personal Food Computers; Warka Water's Warka Water Tower; Sam Van Aken's Tree of 40 Fruit; the ODIN's DIY Bacterial Gene Engineering CRISPR Kit; Michael Strano and Sheila Kennedy's Nanobionic Light-Emitting Plants; MASS Design Group's Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture; Stamen Design's Metagenomic Data Visualization for the Banfield Lab; Modern Meadow's Zoa; Cave Architects' Anthropocene Museum and Kim Albrecht's Visualizing the Cosmic Web.

During a time when we’re looking critically at our interactions with the natural world and our (ill) effect on it, books that help us understand how to take a positive step forward are more important than ever. This paperback explores how designers are collaborating with biologists, engineers, agriculturists, environmentalists, and other specialists to craft a more harmonious and regenerative future. (Lauren Steele Fast Company)

In “Nature,” designers and researchers pose bigger questions, envisioning possibilities that may not be realized for decades, and help us understand arcane data at nano and macro scales. To address fundamental issues in climate change and habitat loss, with their potential for mass extinctions, requires that a creative designer invest passion (and subsume the ego) in a collaboration with scientists working at the cutting edge of research. (James S. Russell New York Times)

A fascinating, informative, engaging, thoughtful and thought-provoking volume of seminal and original volume, "Nature: Collaborations in Design" will prove to be an enduringly valued and appreciated addition to personal, professional, community, and academic library collections. (Michael Dunford Midwest Book Review)

Transgenic silk garments that emit a neon glow, sartorial burial suits embedded with flesh-eating microbes, and a bouquet of perfume notes derived from the DNA of extinct flora are just a few of the mind-bending works of design presented in "Nature." (Aileen Kwun CNN)

The exhibition illustrates the ways in which designers are working with scientists, engineers, and environmentalists to solve the crises stemming from climate change, environmental pollution, and other man-made problems. (Pilar Viladas Architectural Record)

Exhibition to inspire "conversations and change." (Eleanor Gibson Dezeen)

"Nature," which explores the ways designs drawn from nature can address today's environmental challenges, features 62 designers from around the world. (Katherine Roth Associated Press)