On Mycoboscus

On Mycoboscus...
Design Strategies & Epistemology of a Novel Sustainable Craft.
Ph.D. thesis in Architecture – Royal Danish Academy.

Supervised by:
Prof. Phil Ayres, Ph.D. (Royal Danish Academy),
Prof. Dr. Alexandre Monnin (ESC Clermont Business School).

Mycobosci are the result of situated crafting with wood-rot fungi. "Mycoboscus" is formed of the roots múkes (mushroom) and boscus (bois, wood, bush, woodland, to grow). The choice was made to use the suffix boscus rather than lignum (firewood; from Proto-Indo-European leǵ-no-m, that which is collected) to reflect the desirable geographical situating of the practice, formulated in the conclusions of this thesis.

This is an emergent culture that shows incredible ecological and social possibilities!

During the Ph.D., I have been researching how mycobosci can be produced sustainably. Here, I describe the main principles of the fermentation process and present three design strategies for designing mycobosci. I then present briefly the material layouts I designed and tested against the state-of-the-art, and an account of the material designs that were tested mechanically to date. Moving to analyse social sustainability, and inspired by food culture, I draw a perspective for the way this nascent fermentation craft could contribute to forming design terroirs—spaces of ecological relations.
What I found in the research, is that in the work with wood-rot fungi lies the promise of absolutely sustainable eco-social practices!

You can access freely the articles I co-authored during the Ph.D. here.
Thank you for watching, reading, and feel free to contact me to discuss this and more! ✨

Cite as:
Rigobello A. (2023). On Mycoboscus. Design Strategies & Epistemology of a Novel Sustainable Craft. PhD thesis. Copenhagen: Royal Danish Academy.

This thesis was funded by the EU H2020 Future and Emergent Technologies program under grant agreement ID: 858132.