Design Fiction
The Making of a Destiny
Niche Construction 2
SEN Architecture
Still other well-beings need attention. Niche construction, as envisioned here, urges environmental designers and architects to do the difficult.
Revised 8/24/2026
With the denial of climate change, we have now seen that facts can be dismissed. Much of the knowledge concerning the looming end of nature remains tucked away in technical journals and diagrams, inaccessible to a public that lacks meaningful critical thinking.
Population/Size graph
Niche construction calls on design professionals to embrace an interdisciplinary approach that makes environmental data available in visual form.
Spatial design that is no longer arbitrary or tied to a singular vision, and opens new possibilities for reimagining environmental landscapes and architecture as Bionomic symbols. In other words, designs that symbolize a landscape as a living organism. A living thing, full of life, that is more than just scenery.
Recently, I had this experience while swimming in the ocean in Hawaii. The morning sun streams through the water, giving my skin a warm reddish-brown glow. The fish are jumping out of the water as they feed. Suddenly, I have the sensation that I’m not in water but in an entity that is a living thing. It’s like I am a cell in a larger, living body.
It was a large, interconnected system where plants, animals, and people all live together. A terrain that brings life together into one whole, and none of its parts exists by itself.
This is how nature builds bigger and more complex systems. Each one affects and is affected by the others — reciprocal causation. Living things that change and grow over time, and can do things that no single plant or animal can do alone. This means that where rivers, forests, roads, and towns are located determines how healthy a landscape is.
Revised 6/4/26, 8/24/2026
So, not only do specific layouts of environmental designs and buildings matter, but their visual appearance does as well. As products of conservation, ecological, and environmental justice data captured at a point in time, these data snapshots of a given area are transformed and used to develop parametric algorithms that craft imaginative 3D spaces that describe our holistic support for coexistence.
