“The Living Environment ” is all about the spaces and places that humans and non-humans create, interact with, and transition through in their daily lives. As such, it’s a shared environment, perceived differently by different people and species. Importantly, it’s not confined to humans; all living and non-living entities are part of the living environment.

Designers help shape our living environment. They do more than create positive experiences: through design they learn what its inhabitants appreciate, how they behave, and how experiences can be aligned with power dynamics and principles of fairness. It’s a mutual exchange between designing and learning: designers make the environment more pleasant, and their prototypes reveal what 'pleasant' truly means, and for whom.

We connect to the theme "R.A.W." in three ways:

• Rebel: How inhabitants can be given a voice (Unwhorl, Plants & Power, Cane, Culture and Code);
• Authentic: How experimenting with textures, senses, and configurations teaches us how people perceive their environment (Nature's Trace in Glaze, Tabula, Fledgling, SenseScape);
• Worth: How design can spark discussions on preferred futures (Multifunctionality through Modularity, The Invisible Threat, Unstapled and Refoamed).

“The divide between culture - what is designed or created by humans - and nature has become blurry through technological developments.”

Theme Team