Visit time: 10 - 20 minutes
Students from the master’s programmes at the Design Academy Eindhoven present their research on the theme of stigmergy. What can this concept mean for designers?
What is stigmergy?
Stigmergy is a term that originally comes from biology. You see it a lot in insects: bees and ants, for example, use simple signals to build very complex structures. It also occurs on the web, in open source software for example. Without central control and without people communicating directly with each other, complicated systems such as the Firefox web browser or the Linux operating system have been built. Scientific knowledge about stigmergy is still in its infancy. It is difficult to understand how simple things can come together to produce a complex result without central control. It is precisely this apparent contradiction that makes it an interesting subject for designers.
Stigmergy for designers
Students from the master’s programmes in Social Design, Contextual Design, Information Design and The Critical Inquiry Lab at the Design Academy Eindhoven spent a term focusing on the subject of stigmergy. Twelve of them investigated what this concept of a self-organising system could mean for designers. They are presenting the results of this research at Design Museum Den Bosch. The experiments they carried out introduce visitors to stigmergy in design.
The presentation can be seen from 26 September to 18 October 2020 in the Collab on the second floor of the museum.
