Rachel Armstrong is tenured Professor of Experimental Architecture at the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University in the United Kingdom. She is also a Visiting Professor at the Department of Architecture, Campus Sint-Lucas Ghent, KU Leuven in Belgium. She holds a First Class Honours degree with 2 academic prizes from the University of Cambridge, a medical degree from the University of Oxford, The Queen’s College, was admitted as a Member to the Royal College of New Zealand General Practitioners between 2005 and 2015, and holds a PhD in Architecture from the University of London’s Bartlett School of Architecture. Armstrong’s career is characterised by integrative design as a fusion element for interdisciplinary expertise. Early in her career, she made the transition from medicine to architecture having observed that human health and well-being was influenced by many factors beyond those immediately concerning the body. Realising that for a holistic understanding, the input of design, the arts and humanities needed to be integrated within proposals, she pioneered multi-disciplinary initiatives. Drawing on the intersections between cutting edge science, advanced technology and their impact on the body and environment, she pursued a PhD in architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture, to investigate the thesis that such knowledge transfer could render spaces, environments and bodies livelier and healthier. Her PhD (2014) developed semi-living “protocells” to model how living processes could be applied to the foundations of Venetian buildings enabling them to self-repair, which led to a Senior TED Fellowship. Her TED talk to date, has been viewed close to 1.5 million times. The theme of her work is encapsulated in the transition from an industrial era of architectural design to an ecological one, as a fundamental change in the impacts of human development on our health and how we live. Drawing together the fields of architectural design, natural and medical sciences, she calls the synthesis that occurs between them “living” architecture, where constructions share some of the properties that are characteristic of organisms. She creates multi-disciplinary research teams to address complex real-world challenges through conceptually pioneering design prototypes that advance innovation at the point of implementation. By developing “living” technologies, which apply the characteristics of biological systems to perform work, she proposes new standards for sustainable living. Bringing living technologies into proximity with architecture and design, she aims to radically change the impacts of human inhabitation on the environment, so our lifestyles have a net benefit on living systems. Aiming to fundamentally change building impacts her work is applied to develop next-generation sustainable systems exemplified in the H2020 FET Open Living Architecture and ALICE projects for which she was project coordinator.

A pioneer of artistic research, Rolf Hughes has been at the forefront of developments in the field in Scandinavia, the UK and Northern Europe over the last 25 years. He is currently Director of Artistic Research for the Experimental Architecture Group (EAG), and Professor in the Epistemology of Design-led Research at the Department of Architecture, KU Leuven. His research and teaching explore the contribution of artistic (practice-led) research methods to developing transdisciplinary / ecological narratives and epistemologies with a focus on “unspeakable dialogues” between human and nonhuman agencies. A writer across creative and critical genres, sound artist, performer and director, he has recently devised a series of interdisciplinary performances and installations at venues such as the Palais de Tokyo (Paris), the University of the Underground (Amsterdam), the Northern Stage and the Victoria Tunnel (Newcastle), the Max Planck Institute (Florence), and globally via Digital Futures, as well as ongoing collaborations with the sciences, bio-engineering and emerging new technologies. Since 2017, Hughes has contributed artistic research methods to the Experimental Architecture Group (with Professor of Experimental Architecture Rachel Armstrong and designer Pierangelo Scravaglieri). Our work has been exhibited and performed at the Venice Art and Architecture Biennales (2016, 2017, 2019), the Oslo International Theatre Festival (2019), the International Festival of Landscape Architecture organised by the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects (2018), Lakeside Gallery Nottingham (2018), NYU Gallatin (2018), Great North Museum (2018), Trondheim Biennale (2016, 2018), Northern Stage at the Great Exhibition of the North (2018), the Tallinn Architecture Biennale (2017), Uppsala Konsert & Kongress (2017), Allenheads Contemporary Arts, Culture Lab (2017, Newcastle). EAG has lectured and led workshops internationally, including at Monash University, the University of Melbourne, Universidad de Sevilla, the Matadero, Madrid, the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (Barcelona), the University of the Underground (Amsterdam), KU Leuven (Belgium), the TTU Academy of Architecture and Urban Studies (Tallinn), Estonian Academy of Art, the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme, and Stockholm University of the Arts. Hughes has contributed creative and critical writing to a number of recent publications including The Handbook of the Unknowable (2016), Star Ark: A living, self-sustaining spaceship, (2016), Soft Living Architecture: An alternative view of bio-informed design practice (2018), Liquid Life: On Nonlinear materiality (2019), Experimental Architecture: Designing the Unknown (2019), and The Art of Experiment: Post-pandemic Knowledge Practices for 21st Century Architecture and Design (2021).

Maria Usk is an Estonian puppet director, playwright, and researcher. As the manager of the Museum of Puppetry Arts in Tallinn, she founded the first puppet archive in Estonia. In her research, she has developed the method of puppet-thinking as a mean for expanding empirical understanding in education, semiotics, and art. She has published articles about puppetry art as a universal mechanism for the act of cultural translation. Her passion is the use of puppetry as a medium for understanding complex or abstract concepts in areas such as arts, education or anthropology.

Based on his strong systems thinking skills, Jan delivers strategic consultancy projects aiming to transform industrial processes to shape sustainable futures. As a project director he delivers projects of outstanding quality through collaboration and a fully integrated advisory approach. Jan holds the position of Arup’s Materials Skillnetwork Leader in Europe closely linked to Arup’s Resource and Waste Community and is recognized internationally as an expert for selection of sustainable materials and systems and for re-thinking the supply and value chain of industries to maximize the value of materials along their full Life Cycle. Being an architect with a deep technical understanding of the building process and products, Jan has steered a number of successful product developments exploring the potential of bio-based processes and materials for construction. The BioBuild project was awarded with the JEC Innovation Award 2015 and the SolarLeaf Façade won the Zumtobel Group Award for Applied Innovations 2014 and the Detail Produktpreis 2015. Currently Jan leads a product development with bio tech start-up mogu to bring a cladding system with mycelium panels on the European market. Jan enjoys lecturing and teaching, he has delivered key-notes on the subject of collaborative innovations, integrated circular design strategies across the globe. His previous teaching commitments include a role as professor on Global Sustainability and Environment for CIEE in Berlin. Jan is jury member for international design Competition if field of “Sustainability and Circularity”, eg for the SDE 2019 in Hungary.

Esther Armstrong is an academic manager and researcher based within the School of Performance at Wimbledon College of Arts, UK. Armstrong’s career is characterised by an integrated approach to production in live and recorded mediums, covering a variety of professional practices and techniques. She has a broad understanding of performance production and has worked professionally in video, multimedia, film, radio and television as well as live theatre practice. Her research engages with cultural politics, aesthetics and identity formation. She regularly collaborates within interdisciplinary research networks and applies her approach toward scenography and performance to disseminate knowledge to wider audiences.