Tending the Artifact Ecology: Cultivating Architectural Ecosystems

This paper presents a perspective for designing and living in complex, interactive architectural systems (Manganelli, 2013) that are part of ‘artifact ecologies.’(Kirsh, 2010) All organisms co-evolve with their environments and change their respective environments to better suit their needs – this is known as ecological niche construction (Odling-Smee, Laland, Feldman, 2003). For many organisms, including humans, niche construction entails making ‘a better world to live in’ (Clark, 2003) by actively cultivating and shepherding other organisms. But humans are relatively unique with respect to ecological niche construction because humans also cultivate their environment to make ‘a better world to think in’(Clark, 2003). That is, humans also cultivate and shepherd abstract information systems just as they do other organisms (e.g., flowers or crops or animals). Humans tend to their information systems and devices in the service of improving the cognitive dimensions of their ecological niche. This perspective is useful for contemplating the roles and obligations of designers and users with respect to complex, interactive, and intelligent information systems and devices, including buildings. This paper posits that the near future of innovation in environmental design and management will increasingly be driven by the cognitive niche construction aspect of ecological niche construction. This perspective is useful because it frames the integration of computational technologies into environmental systems in a way that illuminates the continuity of human behavior in utilizing physical and non-physical architectures as part of ongoing physical and cognitive ecological niche construction.