"I do not design objects. I design relationships between organisms and materials and environment. A silk worm spinning its cocoon is not making silk — it is coordinating with light, temperature, and geometry simultaneously. That is design intelligence. The worm does not separate computation from fabrication from environment. Neither do I."
Architect and designer who founded the field of material ecology — the discipline of designing objects as if nature were a co-author. At MIT's Mediated Matter Group, her team built the Silk Pavilion using 6,500 live silk worms as a fabrication system coordinating with environmental cues. Aguahoja constructed large-scale architectural structures from water-based biopolymers designed to biodegrade on contact with rain — structures whose material lifecycle is encoded in their design from the first moment.