Cycle 02
Metabolic Interdependencies

We begin the first trimester of the 2025-26 Academic year marking the centennial of the birth of an idea that has only begun to reorient our relationship to the planet today and our role as designers embedded within it. In the midst of the Second Technological Revolution, co-emergent with (and dependent upon) the expansion of European colonial empires, mineralogist Vladimir Vernadsky published The Biosphere in 1926, in Russian. Only fully translated into English more than 70 years later (in itself, a reminder of how geopolitical strife impedes upon the exchange of ideas), the biosphere describes life as a geological force for the first time. In a nutshell, the biosphere shifts the understanding of Earth from an inert object (ripe for unfettered human exploitation / extraction), to Earth as an integrated system of dynamic energy and matter organization (including us humans within this dynamic). As our academic year meets the centenary of the biosphere concept, we ask how this shapes the way we craft and conceive of research-based design practices.

Without the concept of the biosphere, the identification of anthropogenic climate change would be impossible. The biosphere teaches us that Earth Systems as a Planetary whole are coupled (like the atmosphere [air/gas], the cryosphere [glaciers/ice], pedosphere [surface soil], hydrosphere [oceans], lithosphere [upper regions of rock]), such that changes in one system produce changes in other system. For example, we now know that when the atmosphere holds more CO2 from car and airplane emissions, glacier ice melts, oceans rise, land erosion occurs, and habitats (human and otherwise) are affected.(1) Just as evolutionary theory connects us across an expansive time to common microbial ancestors, the biosphere connects us across vast and diverse spaces of co-implication.

What is missing from this list of “spheres” and important for our work as designers is the technosphere: the culmination of human-made artifacts and technologies that have reached a scale, such that their material and energetic production/consumption have altered the conditions for life on Earth. ‘Human-made,’ is a broad generalization considering that the historical accountability for the technosphere emanates largely from the cumulative activities of populations in the Global North and the colonial expansion of Euromodernity across the globe. This culmination dramatically accelerated in the mid-20th Century with the convergence of social, cultural, technical, and economic activity producing bio-geo-chemical consequences at a Planetary scale that comes to scientific recognition through climate change. Effectively, climate change is the evidence of a “metabolic rift” between the biosphere and the technosphere.

The history of design is entangled with perpetuating this metabolic rift, and it is for this reason that we turn our focus to these often invisible processes. In fact, even the notion of a ‘rift’ introduces a false separation between Nature and Society, for which Jason Moore suggests rather a “metabolic shift” (2). Metabolic processes are premised upon material and energetic exchanges, relations and transformations that maintain ‘life’ activity in both organic and inorganic entities. They are intermediaries that unsettle any neat divide between the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’, and undo pictures of ‘individuality’ as self-contained, fully autonomous entities. From the microbial kin labouring in our gut “breaking down sugars that allows for bodies to move, [to] water treatment plants that process urban wastes, […] data server cooling systems that allow for the logistification of food systems, and the industry coordinations of energy, work and supply chains—the presumed autonomic, material processes that mediate the most important yet least examined aspects of life, lives and lifeways” (3). How can sensitivities to these metabolic interdependencies be cultivated? What media mediate these life-maintaining processes, thus making them sensible, intelligible and actionable?

Just as the spatial implications of the biosphere relativize strictly human proportions of ‘locality,’ the focus on metabolic, life-maintaining processes deprivileges human exceptionality, without neglecting our anthropomorphism [that we are human sensory bodies]. How do we understand the situating of research vis-a-vis the porosity of the boundaries of a ‘site’, when its metabolic realities are both local and non-local at once? What proxy entities or “informants” as Kris Dittel calls them, may enable us to perceive non-linguistic signs or traces of metabolic processes, in the way that, for example, lichens act as bioindicators/signals for air pollution. What media and mediating languages can be invented to ‘collaborate’ with such informants? How does such human/more-than-human ‘collaboration’ transform our understanding of design labor, from that of human mastery over inert material, to that of emergent ‘weaving-with’ material? How may research-based design practices work towards the repair and mutation of this punitive metabolic shift that spans not only the bio-geo-chemical domains, but seeps into our social and emotional landscapes?

1. Adam Frank, “The Coming Second Copernican Revolution,” in Noema Magazine, October 2024. 
2. Jason Moore, “Towards a singular metabolism: epistemic rifts and environment-making in the capitalist world ecology,” in: Ibáñez D and Katsikis N (eds), Grounding Metabolism, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 10–19.
3. L. Carver, J. Allen, F. Cruz, M. Bronze and O. V. Francisco, “Editorial,” in HUB Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society, Issue #3 Metabolic Media, 2025.