Living Future 2015

This aspirational session explores how human communities can find inspiring new models of social planning and architectural organization from ultra-social creatures like ants, honeybees, and mycelial fungi, and the ecosystems they inhabit. You will discover how these super-organisms (groups that function like a single individual) facilitate diversity while maintaining cohesion; the social and physical infrastructures that allow them to respond to local conditions effectively and collaboratively; and how our human communities can mimic them and the ecosystems they are within. Our interactive components seek greater understanding of human and non-human collaborative ecosystems, explore the challenges for interdisciplinary “bio-inspiration” teams wanting to apply this understanding, and introduce tools to facilitate this process.