In many colonial species of termites and wasps, large numbers of individual insects collaborate to construct impressive homes. These structures can exhibit complex functional organisation at many scales despite the limited cognitive capacity of the individual builders. Understanding how these feats of collective construction are achieved could unlock a new design paradigm for human architecture. In this talk I’ll present a series of simple simulation studies of collective construction in populations of idealised artificial insects, asking: might we be able to achieve self-organising architectures that combine fine-grained structure and large-scale organisation by employing “waspmites”, artificial insects that hybridize the pheromone-mediated behaviour of termites with the stigmergic building rules of paper wasps?

How to join

Join on MS teams here