We start from the lived relationship between people in urban environments and the wider living world they exist within. Humans are approached as embodied, sensory beings whose bodies continuously perceive, respond to, and move within ecological surroundings.
In an era of ecological crisis, this relationship has become increasingly distant. Nature is often reduced to data, policy targets, or background scenery, something to be managed rather than encountered. This distance is not only conceptual, but sensory. Our practice exists to restore this relationship to lived experience.
Through physical installations, sensory interventions, and situated research, we design encounters in which ecological relationships can be sensed, felt, and experienced directly.
Our work is rooted in a relational and pre-instrumental design approach. We operate upstream: before policy is written, before decisions are made, and before behavioural change is demanded. Rather than designing solutions or fixed outcomes, we design conditions for experience.
We do not approach people as users or consumers, but as sensing bodies: beings that perceive, attune, and are continually influenced by their surroundings. Likewise, we do not treat nature as a theme, resource, or stakeholder. We approach it as an active, sometimes unpredictable presence that people can encounter.
We do not speak on behalf of nature, nor do we attempt to create its voice. Instead, we design situations in which people can become more attentive to what is already present. Allowing encounters to unfold with all their beauty, strangeness, or friction.
The name ECOS traces back to oikos: the ancient Greek word for household, dwelling, and shared conditions of life. It refers not to the management of an economy, but to the lived environment in which beings coexist. For us, ECOS is not a distant academic discipline, but the everyday, embodied entanglement between humans and their surroundings. It names our commitment to designing within the shared household we inhabit, rather than designing about it or for it.
Our practice exists alongside scientific knowledge, not in opposition to it. Where science often abstracts in order to understand, our design practice works through experience in order to sense relationships. These are different, yet complementary ways of knowing. We do not merely translate data; we open up other forms of understanding through the body, treating experience itself as a legitimate source of insight. We work with the following principles:
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Prioritising felt experience alongside thought.
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