Greening urban spaces is of growing importance in the face of climate and demographic change. While vertical greening is a promising and versatile solution in space-limited contexts, its application remains limited. Studies point to social, economic, and ecological challenges. This project explores vertical greening by using textiles as the direct medium for plant growth. Although this technique is expanding in the arts and fashion, it has been overlooked in architecture, urban design, and planting systems. This gap is addressed by developing a series of prototypes that enable plants to grow directly on textiles. Seeds are applied onto fabrics shaped into sculptures or installations, allowing plants to grow and root directly into the textile. The primary textile techniques used are weaving and knitting, with a focus on double-layered structures that can integrate automated water systems and scaffolds. The textile materials employed are of natural origin only, mainly including wool, linen, and cotton. While linen has strong water-absorbent properties, wool appears to have a longer life cycle. Using textiles as a growing medium offers several advantages over conventional vertical greening. Textiles are lightweight, adaptable, and naturally aesthetic. Additionally, they absorb and distribute water across the surface, keeping seeds moist. Using seeds has various advantages in comparison to greenhouse-pregrown plants. Furthermore the system allows adaptation to different ecological, social and architectural contexts. The use of natural textile materials is suited to create circular systems but this comes at the expense of a shorter lifecycle. Another disadvantage is a high demand for water. This project shows the potential of incorporating textiles into greening architecture. While the focus has been on small testing prototypes, these learnings should be applied to larger-scale production systems. Further research in this emerging field could explore holistic water systems, adaptations to different habitats, improved longevity and the use within regenerative cycle systems.

Francis, Robert A., and Jamie Lorimer. „Urban reconciliation ecology: the potential of living roofs and walls.“ Journal of environmental management 92, no. 6 (2011): 1429-1437.

Farrokhirad, Ensiyeh, Marina Rigillo, Manfred Köhler, and Katia Perini. 2024. “Optimising Vertical Greening Systems for Sustainability: An Integrated Design Approach.” International Journal of Sustainable Energy 43 (1). doi:10.1080/14786451.2024.2411831.

Ehrmann, Andrea. „On the Possible Use of Textile Fabrics for Vertical Farming.“ Tekstilec 62, no. 1 (2019).

Keune, Svenja. „Growing textile hybrid structures: Using Plants for Dynamic Textile Transformation, an Approach Towards Biophilic Urbanism.“ In 3rd International Conference of Biodigital Architecture and Genetics, ESARQ, Barcelona, June 7-9, 2017, vol. 3, pp. 264-275. 2017.

Storck, Jan Lukas, Robin Böttjer, Dominik Vahle, Bennet Brockhagen, Timo Grothe, Karl-Josef Dietz, Anke Rattenholl, Frank Gudermann, and Andrea Ehrmann. 2019. „Seed Germination and Seedling Growth on Knitted Fabrics as New Substrates for Hydroponic Systems“ Horticulturae 5, no. 4: 73. https://doi.org/10.3390/horticulturae5040073

University of the Arts London. 2021. “Seed Fabric and Compostable Textiles: MA Textile Design Graduate Apurva Srihari,” March 15, 2021. https://www.arts.ac.uk/colleges/chelsea-college-of-arts/stories/seed-fabric-compostable-textiles-ma-textile-design-graduate-apurva-srihari.

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Uzumaki’s World.” n.d. Beth Williams. https://beth-williams.co.uk/pages/uzumakis-world.

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R&D Living Textile and Ceramic Vessels and Rituals. 2024.” 2025. Alice-Marie Archer Studio. June 7, 2025. https://alicemariearcher.wordpress.com/2025/06/07/rd-living-textile-and-ceramic-vessels-and-rituals-2024/.

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“Lara Campos | Material Designer.” 2024. Lara-Campos.com. 2024. https://lara-campos.com/#be-grounded.

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Singapore is known as a “Garden City,” a title that the city-state has embodied through an extensive network of urban trees, lush city parks, and more recently green facades and roofs. While it has earned a reputation as a world-wide leader in biophilic design, these green spaces have focused primarily on human benefits that rely on control of the natural environment often replacing the historical ecology that has been shrouded by layers of development. This is especially true of Singapore’s shoreline, where the country has used land reclamation to expand its area by 25 percent. While the construction of new land was seen as a vital part of national building, it erased nearly all the original shoreline along with the mangrove forests, natural beaches, and indigenous villages. To complicate matters, Singapore is particularly vulnerable to sea-level rise and compound flooding as roughly a third of the land resides below 5-meters.

“Postcards from the Future” invites the public to explore the past, present, and potential future transformations of the country’s shoreline through Augmented Reality (AR) installations at 24 designated locations that build place-based knowledge, serve as a platform for collaboration across disciplines, and an interactive tool for public engagement. The AR installations visualize sea-level rise scenarios and potential resilience strategies that include nature-based solutions, biomimetic engineering, and traditional ecological knowledge. Building off the country’s Green Plan 2030 pillars “City in Nature” and “Resilient Future,” the project seeks to reframe the challenges of sea-level rise as an opportunity to merge tidal ecosystems with adaptive architecture. By embracing the rising sea and natural processes of regeneration, static shorelines may be replaced by a continually changing shore area, where urban waterfronts are designed in collaboration with coastal habitats. The project was hosted by the Earth Observatory of Singapore. It brought together a transnational and interdisciplinary partnership between scientists, architects, engineers, and artists to provide a platform to exchange knowledge and enable discourse that speculates on how Singapore can develop a long-term planning framework that foregrounds biodiversity and natural systems with climate change resilience to envision a living city designed for all life.

1. Timothy Barnard, Nature’s Colony: Empire, Nation and Environment in the Singapore Botanic Gardens (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2019) 257.
2. The Economist, “Such Quantities of Sand.” February 26, 2015. Accessed October 1^st, 2025. https://www.economist.com/asia/2015/02/26/such-quantities-of-sand
3. Kenneth Er, “Transforming Singapore into a City in Nature,” Urban Solutions, no. 19 (June 2021): 68–77.
4. “Green Plan 2030,” Our Vision, Singapore Government Agency, accessed October 1^st, 2025. https://www.greenplan.gov.sg/vision/
5. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Accessed October 1^st, 2025. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/
6. Miles Alexander Powell, “Singapore’s Lost Coast: Land Reclamation, National Development and the Erasure of Human and Ecological Communities, 1822–Present,” Environment and History 27, no. 4 (2021): 641; Brenda Yeoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment (Singapore: NUS Press, 2003).
7. Singapore National Parks, “City in Nature: key strategies,” last updated February 11^th, 2025, accessed October 1^st, 2025. https://www.nparks.gov.sg/who-we-are/city-in-nature-key-strategies

βI⊙⁻⁹ ∞ LUDIC⁹ explores symbiosis, care, and metamorphosis as principles for reimagining architecture and design through artistic research. It investigates how living matter—microbial cultures, biofilms, and cellulose skins—can become more than materials: companions in processes of play, transformation, and ecological responsiveness.

Methods combine microbial fermentation, material prototyping, and ludic experimentation. Bacterial cellulose and halophilic biofilms are cultivated into masks, membranes, super symbiotic food, and bio-tables that act as discourse-activating objects. In themselves, these ludic artefacts are not epistemic things, but through their participation in play—as method—they enter what has been called the “magic circle” of artistic research. Here, objects evolve into epistemic objects: they generate insight by moving from material growth to discourse, reflection, and peer exchange, producing knowledge through their unfolding metamorphosis.

Results show that these bio-ludic artefacts do not behave as fixed products but as evolving players in multispecies entanglements. Bio-tables foster spaces of care, where microbial growth becomes a sensory presence. Masks and membranes blur nourishment, protection, and performance, while halophilic films embed salt and water cycles into material practice. The outcomes reveal architecture as a living ecology, metabolised through time, smell, and decay, where design is cultivated rather than fabricated.

The findings suggest that play is not only a metaphor but a method for generating artistic-epistemic objects. By staging microbial life and human bodies in acts of care, uncertainty, and co-creation, βI⊙⁻⁹ ∞ LUDIC⁹ produces knowledge that resists extractive and anthropocentric models of design. Architecture is reframed as a ludic and symbiotic practice: an interface of care, a site of metamorphosis, and an ecology of becoming.

• François Jacob, The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity (Pantheon Books, 1973).

• Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: Vom Ursprung der Kultur im Spiel (Rowohlt Taschenbuchverlag, 2019).

• Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

• Emanuele Coccia, Philosophy of the Home: Domestic Space and Happiness (Penguin Books, 2024).

• Margarete Jahrmann, “Das ludische Manifest: Die Kunst des Spiels und ihre gesellschaftliche Wirkung,” in Not at Your Service: Manifestos for Design, ed. Björn Franke (DDE Publikation, 2021).

This project is questioning an alternative vision of digital security through an installation that employs the slime mold Physarum polycephalum as both inspiration and active participant. Unlike conventional encryption systems such as RSA or AES, which remain invisible processes managed by corporations, this work makes security tangible, fragile, and alive. Physarum is a single-celled organism without a brain, yet research has shown that it can solve mazes, optimize networks, and adapt dynamically to changing environments. Its unpredictable but patterned growth becomes a source of biological entropy, a living analogue to random number generation.

In the installation, the vitality of the organism determines the strength of encryption. If it is fed, moist and healthy the security factor of your data increases. When it weakens through neglect, protection declines. Users must therefore engage in ongoing acts of care: feeding, monitoring, and cultivating the organism. Encryption here is no longer an abstract algorithm hidden in a server farm, but a practice of daily carework. This dependency introduces new conceptual frames such as “cryptographic empathy” , the ability to read and respond to the organism’s needs, and the willingness to align with biological rather than computational time.

By playfully coupling data protection with the rhythms of living matter, the installation reveals encryption as a relationship rather than a service. It raises an unsettling but productive question: what happens when the security of our most personal information depends not on corporate infrastructures or mathematical proofs, but on our own capacity to care for a vulnerable life form? In this speculative model, privacy is no longer outsourced. It becomes embodied, relational, and fragile.

- Adamatzky, Andrew. 2010. Physarum Machines: Computers from Slime Mould. Singapore: World Scientific.

- Nakagaki, Toshiyuki, Hiroyasu Yamada, and Ágota Tóth. 2000. “Maze-Solving by an Amoeboid Organism.” Nature 407 (6803): 470. https://doi.org/10.1038/35035159.

- Noddings, Nel. 1984. Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkeley: University of California Press.

- Reid, Christopher R., Tanya Latty, Audrey Dussutour, and Madeleine Beekman. 2012. “Slime Mold Uses an Externalized Spatial ‘Memory’ to Navigate Complex Environments.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109 (43): 17490–17494. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1215037109.

- Rivest, Ronald L., Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman. 1978. “A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems.” Communications of the ACM 21 (2): 120–126. https://doi.org/10.1145/359340.359342.

- Shor, Peter W. 1994. “Algorithms for Quantum Computation: Discrete Logarithms and Factoring.” In Proceedings of the 35th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, 124–34. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society Press. https://doi.org/10.1109/SFCS.1994.365700.

- U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). 2001. Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). FIPS Publication 197. Gaithersburg, MD: NIST. https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/fips/nist.fips.197.pdf.