Update: here is the link to the website of the workshop http://cognition.ups-tlse.fr/fintha/index.html.

From September 23 to September 25, 2009, will hold in the European Centre for Living Technologies in Venice (Italy) a workshop dedicated to the "Engineering principles of innovation in swarm-made architectures". 

The aim of the workshop is to address some of the fundamental issues related to the construction and evolution of nest architectures in social insects and to consider the potential source of inspiration of these biological artifacts in current human architectural design. With the exception of Man, insect societies are the living creatures that build the most diverse and complex forms of architectures. The nests built by ants, wasps, bees and termites play a crucial role in the growth and survival of colonies. All along their evolution, social insects have put in place a whole set of innovations in terms of architectural designs and construction techniques that proved to be efficient to solve problems as various as controlling nest temperature, ensuring gas exchanges with the outside environment or adapting nest structure to various colony sizes. One of the central questions that will be addressed in this meeting is: what are the biological bases of these innovations? Is it possible to identify some basic principles of pattern formation considering the full spectrum of nests built by social insects? How did these principles enable the creation of new structures, and how did they provide solutions to the main functional problems and challenges faced by colonies?

All these issues are closely related to the problem of morphogenesis in biology, that is the identification of the mechanisms underlying the diversity and complexity of biological forms. But they also link different aspects of evolutionary and ecological dynamics: both human societies and ants modify their environment, thus changing their niches. Such niche construction processes are known to play a major role in the evolution of social insects and their (huge) impact on the environment. Maybe the principles found in evodevo between development and evolution on the level of the organism can be extended to the level of the society and their collective activities. Thousands of species of social insects modify their habitats by nest-construction related activities, altering the mineral composition of soils or even local hydrology and drainage. How these changes can relate to human-induced perturbations should be explored in the workshop within the context of sustainable development.

Finally the workshop will address some specific issues related to the use of these principles in the context of modern architectural design and research. How can the principles governing animal architecture be used as a source of inspiration to build sustainable houses? These principles open new ways of designing human architectures. They may also be inspiring for recent work on active niche construction by humans or artificial agents aimed at improving their working environment. By gathering specialists from Behavioral Science, Theoretical and Systems Biology, Statistical Physics and Architecture, this meeting aims at providing answers to these questions and new guidelines for future interdisciplinary research.

The workshop is organized by:

• Guy Theraulaz, Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition Animale, Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France.
• Ricard Solé, Complex Systems Lab, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain.
• Pascale Kuntz, Ecole Polytechnique de l’Université de Nantes, Nantes, France.

You can download the complete program of the workshop here.