Turner boxes

what does co-habitation with urban ecologies mean materially?

Turner Boxes is a design research project that explores what it might mean to relate to wild bees in urban environments without positioning humans as managers, stewards, or extractors. Inspired by the work of early 20th-century entomologist Charles Turner, the project takes the form of small sensing artifacts placed in urban backyard gardens to reflect on how material interventions shape more-than-human lives. Rather than centering efficiency or control, the project investigates how technologies, materials, and human care practices can support more relational, attentive ways of living alongside pollinators. Using situated biomaterials and low-impact sensing, Turner Boxes asks how design might help reveal entanglements between humans, nonhuman species, and urban technoscapes, while grappling with the limits and responsibilities of seeing, knowing, and designing-with other lives.

Publications

Lauren Thu and Ron Wakkary. 2025. Designing-With and Situating Biomaterials. In Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 187, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706599.3720039

This project is led by the Everyday Design Studio at SFU