Digital Living Library

The Living Library website is a digital counterpart to the physical archive. Built as an open-source knowledge base, it supports students and local artists in exploring the region around Karlsruhe, identifying locally available materials, and integrating sustainable practices into their design work. Closely linked to the teaching programme, the website complements the physical sample collection by adding its own dimension of accessibility and continuous transformation. Drawing inspiration from the website as a garden metaphor, its design follows the idea that online archives can grow, change, and decay like a living ecosystem.

From the outset, the website was designed as a work in progress. It went live in its early stages, with only a handful of entries and grew slowly over time, reflecting the growth in collective knowledge as the team continued to learn. Because of this constant change, visitors might have encountered new information or noticed that previous information had been removed or replaced. Instead of a static archive, it acted as a living one, constantly cultivated and reshaped through new knowledge and shifting perspectives.

The website’s primary goal is to help students and visitors engage with the local bioregion. The idea is to help users learn ‘online’ and then apply that knowledge ‘offline’. This focus on physical exploration, whether in the field or in the workshop, is not just to minimise time spent online: it encourages social sustainability by stimulating students to be outside, meet local experts, to develop relationships with surrounding businesses, and to embed themselves within collectives.

Sustainability guided every design decision. Following permacomputing principles, the website is built to minimise energy use and environmental impact. The interface remains intentionally lightweight, with limited use of images and no videos. Even colour choices were adapted along the way to save energy. This approach treats digital design as part of the same ecological commitment that shapes the physical library. Transparency also plays a key role. On a dedicated page, the team calculated the entire energy footprint of the website and explained how it reached that number. Instead of repeating information already available elsewhere, the ‘Archive of archives’ links to existing databases and platforms. This approach reduces the site’s size and maintenance needs in the long term while situating it within a larger ecosystem of regenerative knowledge. The website also communicates smaller things like the file sizes of used images, reminding visitors that the digital infrastructure consumes resources just like the physical library does.

The homepage, like the rest of the website, is intentionally minimal to reduce energy use. It has no images or anything else that requires loading large files and despite originally launching with a bright green background or a black background depending on people’s personal preference, the green background option was later removed to save a few more watts per year.

At the heart of the website lies a collection of interactive regional maps. Rather than applying a single rigid system, each map is custom-made for the material it documents. A map of community gardens in the city provides precise coordinates and names but a map of mycelium in the region instead highlights less clearly defined areas where underground conditions are such that you might encounter fungi there. The maps remain unfinished and sometimes even deliberately ‘empty’, to encourage exploration and allow for continuous revision rather than completion.

Accompanying the maps is the Lexicon, a collection of key terms and concepts that contextualise the project. Initially written on day one, it was revised continuously to reflect a change in understanding. Definitions of ‘local’, ‘sustainable’, or ‘biodegradable’ shifted as the team experimented with new materials and new definitions were added throughout the process. The lexicon was also closely connected to the education programme. Through the field trips, workshops, and colloquia, information was collected, documented, and then published. With new perspectives from invited makers and experts, existing information on the website was sometimes removed or rewritten.

As mentioned before, the Archive of archives links visitors to other material databases, regional initiatives, and research platforms. Not only does this avoid having to duplicate information, it also positions the website as part of a larger not-so-local ecosystem of regenerative knowledge that keeps on growing independently after our website ends.

If you’re reading this in the future, the Living Library website may no longer exist in its original form. Whether you found it on another server or rediscovered it on an old hard drive, we hope that it can be regenerated. Treat it like fertile soil, something that can always give rise to new growth, new definitions, and new knowledge.