Research Field Thesis

Since I started to think about the topic of my bachelor thesis my interest is lying in two very broad fields: Material and Nature. I am very fascinated by how humanity is able to take matter and form it according to its needs. Material always follows a certain use in order to form objects and processes a person is then able to interact with. On the other hand, there is the notion of nature. I personally think, our society gradually separates itself from nature since the past centuries. In my opinion, we should live more in unison with nature in order to fit into the ecosystem of our planet. If we do not achieve that, we destroy our living ground and therefore threaten our and other species’ existence.

This change needs to be designed, since it is a change not only for one but for many. There are many aspects to it, because we need to change our way of living in this world. This way of living is deeply connected to how we interact with our surroundings and with it the way how we use material. Combining nature and materiality seems to therefore be an interesting field to investigate as a topic for my thesis.

In the past month, I read a lot about materials and their scientific development, which often comes with the notion of digital fabrication, about natural materials (which seems to be often limited to either fungi or algae-based materials), but also about the notion of speculative design and how visions can inspire to development and process. When digesting the literature, I always tried to contextualize the information to nature as well as to materials. Since we live in a more and more digital world (which brought many benefits to the human kind in my opinion), I also often incorporated digital (and with it dynamic) material in my thinking process. After the research, the notion of biodiversity stuck to my head. For me, (bio)diversity is one of the major keys to a stable system. That is why I came up with the following thesis:

In the future, we have organic machines that all fulfil the same desired purpose but differ in its material and therefore lead to diverse “harvesting” of resources.