Studio 207 · Nov 21, 2025 - 12:30 pm
The increasing impact of digital infrastructures on planetary health demands urgent action in computational sustainability. We would like to present our compost computing project which demonstrates how critical design and more-than-human perspectives can reimagine our relationship with technology, ecology, and the climate crisis.
Led by UAL’s Critical Climate Computing (CCC) in partnership with Manchester arts organisation FutureEverything, this project pioneered a radical reimagining of web infrastructure by designing and implementing a biomatter-powered server for FutureEverything’s public-facing website. Moving beyond conventional renewable energy approaches, the project explored whether computational infrastructure could be directly integrated into ecological cycles, powered by compost from Manchester Urban Digger’s Platt Fields urban garden.
The biomatter server represents a proof-of-concept that challenges assumptions about digital infrastructure’s separation from natural systems. By harnessing microbial fuel cell technology, the server draws power from the biochemical processes occurring in decomposing organic matter, creating a tangible connection between the digital realm and ecological regeneration. This approach questions the extractive relationship between computation and environment.
The project’s outcomes extend beyond a single implementation. We have developed a open-access toolkit to enable people to replicate the biomatter server approach.
By choosing a website—arguably the most ubiquitous digital artifact—as the intervention site, the project demonstrates that radical sustainability can have everyday applications. This project ultimately argues that addressing computation’s climate impact requires more than efficiency improvements; it demands reconceptualising the relationship between digital infrastrucutres and ecological systems.
Mariana Marangoni is a Brazilian artist and researcher based in London. Through a wide range of media such as installations, web-based experiments and visual poetry, Mariana critically explores the materiality of media and the aesthetics of decay. Recent work has been focused on unconventional computational paradigms for an increasingly exhausted planet. She is currently a PhD student at UAL Creative Computing Institute and works as a Lecturer in MA Interaction Design at LCC. Amongst others, has been featured internationally at the Victoria and Albert Museum, National Poetry Gallery, and Rhizome.
Dr Eva Verhoeven
Eva is a design researcher, artist and educator. She is the co-founder of Supra Systems Studio and works as a Programme Director Creative Computing & Robotics (UG) at the Creative Computing Institute, UAL.
Eva is interested in the consequences of technological developments and its relays into society, and investigates computational culture through design research. A current focus is the scope of post-human centred design and the responsibility of design in shaping our material realities.
Eva has published on the ethics of interface design, the tactics of more than human maker culture, pedagogies for planetary health and the Commons in Design; and has exhibited and presented her research nationally and internationally.