There’s license in the arts to question very normative assumptions. The engineering approach of designing infrastructures as living systems does still give me hope for how we might rethink human systems more broadly. But I continue to feel quite frustrated with the way that engineering as a discipline tends to frame problems as technical challenges. You’re supposed to scope out the political and social forces that are causing an environmental problem, and just slap a technical fix on the end of it. Even the work I was doing — that really nice, innovative, environmental work — was facilitating terrible housing developments full of huge McMansions. It seemed like my job was to make these wildly unsustainable projects just a little bit less bad.

So I started to get more and more interested in different kinds of questions. Like, who and what do we value? What do we think we need in order to have a good life? These weren’t questions we asked as engineers, but they were questions I could ask as an artist.

For example, as an engineer, your goal is to minimize risk to humans living in the environment, and to do this, you have to adhere to regulations such as human health standards. But the cost may be the capacity of other, nonhuman species to live and flourish. At some point, you have to think about how you weigh that cost. We urgently need to expand the definition of human health to also include the fates of other life forms. There was very little room in the space I was working in to explore these assumptions and the cost of designing from a solely human-centric perspective.

That balancing act reminds me of something engineer and professor Deb Chachra wrote in one of her newsletters. She wrote, “Sustainability always looks like underutilization when compared to resource extraction.”

That’s beautiful. Deb also writes about infrastructure as being care at scale, which I think is a nice way to think about it. Could there be a model where infrastructures don’t just care for humans, but also care for the ecosystems where they’re acting?

I’m obsessed with water leaks for that reason. If you look at a water pipe at the point where it’s leaking, you usually have these little gardens popping up, all these little ecosystems that are taking advantage of the water supply. There’s been fascinating research published on how leaks from water distribution systems in cities actually recharge groundwater aquifers because most of these systems leak 10 to 30 percent of their water.

Of course, there’s also research going on at MIT and all these engineering schools on how to to develop little autonomous robots that go into the pipes and find the leaks and plug them up. From the perspective of design and engineering, the system is not supposed to be porous; leaks are a problem, an inefficiency. But it actually takes more than just humans to make the city. What about the street trees that depend on those leaks? So then the question becomes: is there a way we can share resources with other species rather than completely monopolizing them?