Superflex: Design for humans and marine life

What do you get when you put a Danish artist group together with oceanographers, material scientists, and marine biologists? The answer is an idea which might just change the way we imagine and design our environments in response to rising sea levels.

As warnings about the effects of global warming escalate, Superflex - an art group founded by Jakob Fenger, Bjørnstjerne Christiansen and Rasmus Nielsen in 1993 – have been working on a long term project to imagine a world where the original function and aesthetics of our carefully designed world may be lost to the tide.

Commissioned by TBA21-Academy, the project is called Deep Sea Minding and it considers whether it’s possible to design and create structures that could serve the needs and desires of both humans and marine life.

So in their headquarters in Copenhagen, the team at Superflex are mixing concrete and amino acids together to see whether they can create bricks to make houses and schools which can be occupied by humans first and then fish. They’re also preparing a prototype structure to be placed on the seabed to test the responses of fish to this new material.

Over the course of nine months Laura Hubber joins Rasmus Nielsen from Superflex for one leg of their epic journey –taking in California, Copenhagen and Jamaica - and meeting a Mermaid along the way.

Presented by Laura Hubber and produced by Emma Kingsley and Ella-mai Robey for BBC World Service.

Original music from Dive-In composed by Dark Morph (Jón Þór Birgisson and Carl Michael von Hausswolff)