Pedagogy 2025

Abstract

TapiriTech is an experimental pedagogical platform designed to cultivate ecosystemic democracy through the integration of tangible modeling, digital projection, and community-based storytelling; it invites students and community members to co-design with their ecosystems, making visible the often-overlooked flows of water, wildlife, ancestral paths, and multispecies narratives. TapiriTech transforms abstract territorial concepts into a shared, tactile learning surface—a “pedagogical table” where multispecies agency, Indigenous knowledge, and environmental justice converge. Conventional planning pedagogy frequently relies on maps and simulations that are tailored to technical audiences. TapiriTech counters this tendency by projecting dynamic data and narratives onto CNC-milled terrain models, bringing together Indigenous memory, ecological relationships, and contemporary justice concerns. Participants engage spatially and dialogically, learning through hands-on interaction and systemic exploration. The platform has been prototyped in two contrasting territories: Petare, Caracas—one of Latin America’s largest self-produced urban environments—and N’dakinna, New Hampshire—ancestral land of the Abenaki people. In Caracas, students and residents used TapiriTech to co-design blue and green infrastructure aimed at increasing spatial opportunities in vulnerable barrios. In New Hampshire, Abenaki leaders and architecture students collaborated to map non-human journeys—rivers, wildlife, and forest dynamics—as central agents in spatial design. “Tapiri” comes from the Yek’wana people of the Amazon, referring to a communal space for making decisions and living in relation with human and non-human kin. TapiriTech builds on this ethos, using hybrid analog-digital tools to reconnect technology with ancestral knowledge and transform the studio into a space of ecological care and shared world-making.