Melissa Sterry

University of Greenwich · Department of Architecture and Landscape

Discussion of the potentialities of biomimetic architecture.

Asking "how would nature design a city" with resilience to natural hazard events?

The coalface of innovation has never been an easy ascent. Though, in the minds of those that talk it, without having walked it, taking ideas from paper to market can be accomplished by following a series of bullet-points and soundbites, in reality no idea is too good to not fail, and even the best usually have a sell-by-date. Yet, even amidst the t...

Integral to the reproductive processes of the biota of several forest, shrub, and grassland biome-types, wildfire ignites some 3,400,000km2 of Earth's vegetated surface annually (Willis et al, 2017). Though a highly complex phenomena coupled with not one, but several Earth systems, human actions are both directly and indirectly changing wildfire fr...

Integral to the reproductive processes of the biota of several forest, shrub, and grassland biome-types, wildfire ignites some 3,400,000km2 of Earth’s vegetated surface annually (Willis et al, 2017). Though a highly complex phenomena coupled with not one, but several Earth systems, human actions are both directly and indirectly changing wildfire fr...

Commissioned report discussing how emerging developments in science, technology, engineering, and design suggest multiple facets of travel may develop over the coming decades.

What will our world look like in 20 years? The Springwise Future 2043 report asks the world’s top futurists to describe the solutions, innovations, and surroundings we might experience as we head towards 2043.

As multiple Earth systems' signals suggest we are fast-entering a new ‘fire age’, the problem of living with wildfire has become one of the most complex and contentious design challenges of our time. Mired in political, economic, and cultural debate, designers, architects, planners, and policymakers need navigate many fields in order to grasp the i...

Tyre Wear Particles (TWP) are the abraded surface of vehicle tyres, between 1nm to 0.5mm, and deposited on the road surface or blown into surrounding environments. TWP comprise a cocktail of natural rubber, synthetic compounds, fillers, antioxidants, antiozonants and curing systems. Due to the mix of materials, they are classed as a microplastic....

Presentation on the causes and possible solutions to micro and nano pollution from tyres entering oceans, rivers, and waterways delivered at the Global Research & Innovation in Plastics Sustainability conference hosted by Knowledge Transfer Network in the UK.

Keynote presentation delivered for the Greater Dandenong City's New World | New Ideas series on December 9th 2020, discussing global drivers of innovation and how and why markets are founded, shaped, and influenced over time.

Keynote presentation delivered for SUEZ group's webinar on the problem of micro and nano pollution from tyres entering oceans and the environment at large, including current leading-edge and likely near future advances in artificial intelligence, satellite, arial, and terrestrial imagery, environmental sensing, big data, nanomaterials, biomaterials...

Lead contributor to the Tech to the Future report, commissioned by UK digital sector leader CW Jobs, which looked to the impact of new technologies, such as smart phones and bluetooth, to the technology employment market and workplace over the twenty years, and forward to the developments likely to emerge in the coming two decades. Report availab...

Closing keynote, titled ‘Human Dot to Non-Human Dot: Connecting Human Places to Abiotic and Biotic Systemic Spaces’, explaining how wildland, and peri-urban and urban fires of past and present can inform built environment policy, planning, and design futures.

Closing keynote, titled ‘[Re]Generation[s]: Once in Many Lifetimes Opportunities’, discussing how the disparity between human and non-human, and indigenous and non-indigenous systems may be reconciled if applying lessons learned from fire-adapted species and cultures.

Presentation on the principle factors shaping the cities of the past century, and they likely to shape the century ahead. Viewable online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX0pFSznDq0

Keynote presentation discussing how psychology and philosophy shape perceptions of the natural world and our relationship with it; how perceptions of the natural world have changed throughout space and time; how the natural world is perceived across cultures today; how it is likely to be perceived in the years and decades ahead; and why and how thi...

Keynote presentation on technology in the human journey, discussing the evolution of the codification and computation of information across cultures and epochs.

Closing keynote, titled ‘At the Interface: Where Planetary and Human Systems Meet’, exploring how leading-edge STEM-based innovations, including studies of fire-adapted flora and fauna, in concert with the ilk of satellite, arial, and terrestrial sensing and processing systems, offer novel approaches to building resilience to hazards.

Integral to the reproductive processes of the biota of several forest, shrub, and grassland biome-types, wildfire ignites some 3,400,000km2 of Earth’s vegetated surface annually. Though a highly complex phenomena coupled with not one, but several Earth systems, human actions are both directly and indirectly changing wildfire frequencies, intensitie...

Integral to the reproductive processes of the biota of several forest, shrub, and grassland biome-types, wildfire ignites some 3,400,000km2 of Earth’s vegetated surface annually. Though a highly complex phenomena coupled with not one, but several Earth systems, human actions are both directly and indirectly changing wildfire frequencies, intensitie...

Integral to the reproductive processes of the biota of several forest, shrub, and grassland biome-types, wildfire ignites some 3,400,000km2 of Earth’s vegetated surface annually. Though a highly complex phenomena coupled with not one, but several Earth systems, human actions are both directly and indirectly changing wildfire frequencies, intensitie...

Integral to the reproductive processes of the biota of several forest, shrub, and grassland biome-types, wildfire ignites some 3,400,000km2 of Earth’s vegetated surface annually. Though a highly complex phenomena coupled with not one, but several Earth systems, human actions are both directly and indirectly changing wildfire frequencies, intensitie...

Integral to the reproductive processes of the biota of several forest, shrub, and grassland biome-types, wildfire ignites some 3,400,000km2 of Earth’s vegetated surface annually. Though a highly complex phenomena coupled with not one, but several Earth systems, human actions are both directly and indirectly changing wildfire frequencies, intensitie...

Integral to the reproductive processes of the biota of several forest, shrub, and grassland biome-types, wildfire ignites some 3,400,000km2 of Earth’s vegetated surface annually. Though a highly complex phenomena coupled with not one, but several Earth systems, human actions are both directly and indirectly changing wildfire frequencies, intensitie...

Integral to the reproductive processes of the biota of several forest, shrub, and grassland biome-types, wildfire ignites some 3,400,000km2 of Earth’s vegetated surface annually. Though a highly complex phenomena coupled with not one, but several Earth systems, human actions are both directly and indirectly changing wildfire frequencies, intensitie...

Integral to the reproductive processes of the biota of several forest, shrub, and grassland biome-types, wildfire ignites some 3,400,000km2 of Earth’s vegetated surface annually [1]. Though a highly complex phenomena coupled with not one, but several Earth systems, human actions are both directly and indirectly changing wildfire frequencies, intens...

Keynote talk titled, ‘Wildfire in the Wilderness: Wildfire, Ecology, and Us’ presenting how human societies have embraced different fire cultures over time; how and why wildfire behaviour is changing; and how mimicry of pyrophytes presents compelling new opportunities in mitigating the risks that wild and urban fires present.

Atop one of the best vantage points in London, The Monument, historian and author, Dr. Matthew Green and design scientist and systems theorist Melissa Sterry unite past, present, and future, as they round off the Monument Masterclasses series in an event curated by renowned literary salon, 5x15. Exploring the theme of the evolving relationship betw...

Differences, dualities, and dichotomies play a fundamental role within the psychological and philosophical frameworks through which humans interpret phenomena. Boundaries and binary oppositions abound in our thinking and actions, manifesting metaphysically and physically, internally and externally, and on all conceivable scales. Drawing upon insigh...

”Biome Shock! Anthropogenic vs. Ecological Intelligence”, which was first delivered at BioSalon III in autumn 2016, explores the psychological and philosophical dimensions of humanity’s relationships with our surroundings, and the possible implications thereof to design, architecture, and urban research and practice now and in the future.

Developing interdisciplinary education and research practice that accommodates for the psychological and philosophical variances of students, researchers, and society at large at a time of rapid societal change and upheaval.

An examination of the psychological and philosophical factors that shape our understanding of the world about us, and the implications thereof to researchers and practitioners within the arts, sciences, and humanities.

Exploring the potentialities of biodesign, biotechnology, biomimetics, and biological systems in architecture, urban design and infrastructure in the built environments of the now, near, and far future.

Exploring floral and faunal patterns, their causations, variances, and possible application in design, architecture, and planning.

Exploring biology as model, metaphor, and medium in architecture, urban design, and infrastructure in the built environments of the now, near, and far future.

Exploring biologically informed and inspired built environment futures, including the potentialities of biodesign, biotechnology, biomimetics, and biological systems, and combinations thereof.

Exploring the potentialities of biology as model, metaphor and medium in the cities of the now, near and far future.

Exploring the potentialities and possible trajectories as may manifest from identification and application of ecological resilience behaviours, relationships, and systems to architecture, urban design, and planning.

Exploring the potentialities of biologically and ecologically sensitive approaches to architecture, urban design, and city planning.

Exploring the interface between human and animals architectures, including indigenous, migratory, domestic and invasive networks and resource flows, and their implications for architecture and city planning.

A discussion of ecological networks in cities. Available to download at http://www.ideasfestival.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/BFOI-Festival-of-the-Future-City-Book-Text-Pages-SOFT.pdf

Discussing the role of imaginary cities in evolving architectural and city narratives.

Exploring the potentialities for biomimetics in future built environments, including the creation of greater urban resilience to natural hazards through the application of ecological resilience principles found in the behaviours, relationships, and systems of floral and faunal species.

Exploring the latest insights into ecological resilience at the level of both species and systems, and how through the extrapolation and application of the findings, thereon insights thereof to architecture, urban design, and planning, we may build greater urban resilience to natural hazard events.

A discussion at the interface of ecological and social systems in architecture, urban design, and planning, including the intended and unintended consequences of human thought and action, and risks and opportunities to urban biodiversity and ecologies, and anthropogenic psychological and physical wants and needs.

A discussion of biomimetics and the built environment. Article available to download at http://www.sgi.org/resources/sgi-quarterly-magazine/10052.html

Exploring the potentialities of new and emerging thinking, practice, technology, and systems in building urban and societal resilience to major environmental and anthropogenic threats including natural hazards, displacement, and civil and inter-nation conflicts.

An examination of the potentialities of vernacular architectures in environmentally dynamic regions in the age of satellite and terrestrial information communications technologies, rapid prototyping, 3D printing, biodesign and synthetic biology.

Discussing why and how the predominant architectural narrative needs to change to become more ecologically inclusive of indigenous and migratory, domestic and wild animals, therein support ecological networks at the scale of city, nation, and planet. View at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ip8yDYDoq3s

A discussion of the need to accommodate for ecological and social networks in architecture and urban design. http://humanspaces.com/2015/02/20/seen-unseen-the-biological-and-social- networks-of-cities-part-1/ http://humanspaces.com/2015/03/06/seen-unseen- the-biological-and-social-networks-of-cities-part-2/

Discusses the potentialities for life-like buildings and infrastructure.

Discussing the challenges and opportunities of developing sustainable cities, including the urgent imperative to address inequalities, including gender, age, and race; experiential differentiation in urban areas; and the need for greater transdisciplinary approaches by means of addressing the absence of understanding of scientific principles on the...

A discussion of the potentialities for the identification of ecological resilience principles and the application thereof to future city design.

A discussion of the potentialities offered by new thinking, methods, and approaches in education and research, and relating to a plenary speech delivered during the conference. Find the item p.16-17 at the following link https://view.publitas.com/singleclick-limited/inventing-the-future/page/16-17

Exploring wide-ranging aspects of bio-informed design systems within cities and society, including the theory of the various bio-informed and bio-inspired disciplines; bio-informed materials and their applications; bio-informed engineering and architecture; bio-informed infrastructure and city-scale systems; urban resilience to natural hazard event...

A discussion of possible built environment trajectories as may become manifest whereupon new and emerging developments in biologically informed thinking and practice are applied.

Exploring facets of the emerging built environment paradigm, including biologically informed buildings and infrastructures.

Exploring the potentialities of biomimetics in fields including health, manufacturing, business, architecture, urban planning, smart cities, and natural hazard resilience in the near, medium and far future.

Exploring ways in which flora and fauna species create, distribute and store energy, and how these phenomena could inform future energy solutions in cities.

Exploring facets of resilience within ecological systems, including recovery protocols, and how we may migrate these to the built environment using emergent science, technology and thinking.

Discussing the behaviours of biological systems, and how emergent science, technology and thinking enables us to mimic those systems within the buildings and cities of the now, near, and far future.

Exploring how emerging science, technology and thinking in building and infrastructure could enable humanity to build cities more resilient to environmental change, including both seasonal and extreme weather. Discussion of the potentialities for applying the principles of ecological resilience and, more broadly, systems thinking to architecture an...

Exploring how and why manufacturing is going full-cycle, from local to global to local, from small-scale to mass-production, and back again, and how emergent design, technology and infrastructure and culture could upscale this trend, and what new build environment models may emerge in consequence.

A discussion of the cities of the past, present and future.

Discussing the fundamental precepts of the bionic city hypothesis, including the integration of the behaviours, relationships and systems of flora and fauna and their assemblages, including in response to environment change, and how these behaviours, relationships, and systems may inform architecture, urban design, and planning. Thereon, positing h...

Exploring how markets are transformed from the outside in, as radical change at the edges - most often unsupported by investment, policy and industry consensus, drives the foremost innovations in industry and society. Examined within both an historical and contemporary context, using sectors including medical bionics, and the music and media indust...

Exploring the potentialities of radical and disruptive technologies and systems to enable new approaches to research and development, and in turn new models for cities.

Discussing how emergent technologies are and will continue to change the research and development, design, production, distribution and retail of goods and services.

Introducing the concept of biomimetics, its potential within design, production and technology now and in the near and far future, including possible applications of biomimetics in cities.

Introducing biomimetics, a brief outline of its potential in design and production, and its potential as a tool for architecture, urban design and planning innovation.

A provocation presented as an avatar from the future, defining the events that shaped the early 21st Century - starting with biomimetics and bionics, before expanding to a broader range of disruptive technologies, including smart technologies, 3D printing and rapid prototyping. Making the connections between the drivers of change (i.e. dwindling re...

Discussing the foremost disruptive innovations of the early twenty first century, contextualised in regard of sustainability issues, and the risks and opportunities to business and society (i.e. new product and service markets) these scenarios could create.

Exploring the risks and opportunities for biomimetic cities using science fiction metaphors and scenarios.

Introduction to biomimetics and to some of the latest developments in the field, thereon a brief outline of my hypothesis and research, and a discussion of how and why biomimetic systems design may enable greater city resilience to natural hazard events.

Introducing biomimetics, the Bionic City hypothesis, and the scenarios that underpin its theoretical precepts and design approach.

Exploring how humanity is part of the bigger environmental picture and contextualising the symbiotic relationships between humanity and nature. Using international folklore as a metaphor, examining how for millennia humans have watched and observed natural phenomena, building tales, myths and legends around those observations. Discussing how the fi...

Taking participants on a journey spanning 3.8 billion years, starting with the origins of life and the evolution of its patterns, behaviours, relationships, and systems. Thereon introducing biomimetics and the near, medium, and long-term potentialities of its application to design in fields including materials, architecture, planning, robotics, man...

Challenging participants to create original biomimetic design in the fields of materials, architecture, planning and product design. Students briefed to imagine they are aliens that, having travelled to Earth, need study the human body as inspiration for their new inventions, considering how a skin-like material may behave, how a nervous system-lik...

A discussion of the potential to create architecture and urban design that accommodate for environmental flux. http://thisbigcity.net/creating-resilient-citie-in-step-with-the-seasons/

Discussing the primary challenges facing the lighting industry and those working with lighting technologies, including architects, interior designers, urban designers, and planners, including rising energy prices, market instability, resource scarcity and light pollution. Thereon, examining the emergence of urban ICT innovations and how these impac...

Introducing futurism and scenario building; an historical contextualisation of humanity’s current environmental predicament; complex systems theories including Chaos Theory; emergent design theories, methodologies and technologies, including adaptive and living architectures; sustainability in context - how and why new design paradigms are emerging...

A provocation - presenting the predominant vision of the future city and highlighting the flaws therein. Putting the built environment into its wider physical context, discussing complex systems theories and natural hazards, together with their environmental and social impacts, in the past, present, and possible future, and the cultures and belief...

Discussing the precepts of the Bionic City, including the possible potentialities for biomimetic architecture, urban design, planning, and infrastructure systems in the cities of the near and far future.

Discussing the potentialities of developing cities that mimic the behaviours, relationships, and systems of flora and fauna, and in doing so become resilient to environment flux, including natural hazards.

Introducing to the predominant vision of the future city, critiquing that vision and the statistical assumptions that underpin it. Thereon discussing the environmental challenges facing the world’s cities, introducing complex adaptive systems theory and closely related theories. Framing humanity’s existence in the wider environmental context, inclu...

Opening: contextualising my hypothesis, referencing major sustainability trends; past, present and projected future natural hazard events; bionics, biomimetics, and related scientific disciplines; major trends in design, engineering and technology; resilience theory in the context of natural ecosystems and biodiversity; key components of my hypothe...

Opening: Discussing the wider sustainability issues facing the cities of the now, near and far future; past, present and possible future natural hazard scenarios; innovations in science and technology that could lend themselves to the exploration of new resilience paradigms; emergent trends in architecture, construction, materials, planning, transp...

Opening: contextualising my hypothesis, including an introduction to biomimetics; bullet-pointed key aspects of the hypothesis; relating those aspects to relevant scientific sources, to global sustainability, design, architecture, engineering and technology trends, and to hypothesis/predictions for future natural hazard scenarios. Closing: recap an...

Discussing the philosophical precepts of the Bionic City, and the potential for building urban resilience to natural hazard events through the mimicry of ecological resilience behaviours, relationships, and systems of flora and fauna species.

The design paradigm of the 20th Century has become defunct, as a myriad of environmental changes simultaneously take effect. What worked yesterday often fails to work today. Nature is adept at responding to change and embeds a degree of resilience into its technologies and infrastructure that is rarely witnessed in man-made design, engineering and...

A discussion of the potentialities for developing urban resilience to natural hazards through the mimicry of the behaviours, relationships, and systems of flora and fauna.

Opening: an overview of the nature of connectivity, including symbiosis in ecosystems, both natural and anthropogenic; key connectivity trends, including rapid R&D and adoption of smart technologies; summary of smart cities and the opportunities and challenges they present; introduction to my hypothesis, and to its fundamental principles; explanati...

Opening: overview of past and present visions of the future city; Introduction to the new architectural language including emergent ideologies, methodologies and technologies; introduction to biomimetics and summary of the factors that underpin my research interests in the field; introduction to broader sustainability issues and to the trends withi...

Exploring the renewable energy technologies of the now and near future. Find article at https://issuu.com/sustained/docs/009

An exploration of sustainable design futures. https://issuu.com/sustained/docs/issue_008

A discussion of the dynamics driving celebrity culture in the popular media. Item available on request.

Exploring facets of social enterprise. Available at the following link: https://issuu.com/sustained/docs/issue_007

A discussion of the phenomena celebrity in popular culture and its impacts at the individual and societal scale.

A discussion of celebrity culture in the popular media and society.