Living the Forest Lab in Corsica
A two week excursion to Corte (Corsica): Merging Environmental Challenges with Electrical Engineering.
Athena Grandis
Sara Recihert
Linhtan Tranguyenn
Karl Schmitz
Ines Weigand
Jakob Kukula
Karim Nicolae Costan
For two weeks in Corsica, we intertwined the principles of regenerative and systemic design with electrical engineering and hands-on experimentation, searching for common vocabularies, practices and methods. With this excursion, we aimed to integrate ecological and design perspectives, as well as a practical approach to specific planetary challenges, into the teaching of electrical engineering. To achieve this, we used the 'living lab' approach, which situates scientific endeavors in lived realities and test them in practice. This transdisciplinary methodology allows us to speculate about desirable social futures and to initiate transformative processes.
However, while transdisciplinarity is widely encouraged, science often prefers to remain within its comfortable boundaries, with institutional and personal barriers to cross-disciplinary collaboration - such as mistrust, fear of friction, or the risk of exposing vulnerabilities - often outweighing the potential benefits.
To explore the potential of the 'living lab' approach in electrical engineering education, we organized an excursion to Corte, Corsica (a French island in the Mediterranean Sea), where we focused on real-world issues such as forest fires to highlight the critical role of forests in biodiversity, climate regulation and ecosystem conservation. The group consisted of sixteen participants, including electrical engineers, computer scientists, designers and sociologists.
After a long two and a half-day journey from Berlin to Corte by train and ferry, we began the excursion with a workshop led by Ines Weigand on Human-Nature-Technology Entanglements. In this workshop, participants explored the environmental humanities, looking at human-nature relationships, ecological integration, and ethical, political and design challenges. They engaged with systemic design approaches, eco-literacy, and regenerative practices and learned how to understand and apply ecological principles in real-world contexts, particularly through site-based explorations in Corsica. The workshop also encouraged reflection on how to design and interact with natural systems (read more about the workshop
After the workshop, we started experimenting with the material and electrical components we brought with us to Corte. We explored the surroundings of Corte, walking through areas affected by forest fires in 2023, experiencing the rainy forest just before spring, and walking through wild mountains hidden behind low clouds and cut by strong rivers. We had a chance to appreciate the quiet before the high season, take field recordings, experiment with LoRa technology and sensors, and work on other collaborative projects.
Corte is home to the Università di Corsica Pasquale Paoli, the only university in Corsica. As forest fires are a common problem there, we connected with the university's "Fire" project, which works at the intersection of physics, ecology, chemistry, computer science and image processing to model and experiment with forest fires.
We also visited the FabLab Corte, an open workshop for students and the public, organized by the Università di Corsica Pasquale Paoli. Located in the heart of the citadel of Corte, the FabLab is equipped with various machines, including 3D printers, a laser cutter, woodworking tools and a co-working space. In order to improve the exchange between the people of the Fab Lab and us, we organized an Atari Punk Console workshop open to all participants.
The excursion ended with a final presentation of all the projects completed during the nine days we spent in Corte, followed by a long journey back to Berlin.