About Design for Wildfire
Welcome to our Substack, which is dedicated to exploring, advancing, and sharing bio-inspired approaches to living with wildfires. Here we publish essays, films, podcasts, updates, research insights, and more from Dr. Melissa Sterry and the team at the Design for Wildfire school and the Firescape Lab™.
Design for Wildfire is a space for thinkers, makers, educators, professionals, students, and anyone curious about how design can respond to the realities of our rapidly changing world. Our content bridges cutting-edge research, field observation, speculative design, and real-world application — all grounded in ecological intelligence and a deep respect for nature’s own strategies for resilience.
Who We Are
At the helm is chartered design scientist, systems theorist, biodesigner, and serial founder, Dr. Melissa Sterry who brings her extensive transdisciplinary insight into how the structures, behaviours and biochemistries of fire-adapted species can inform architecture, planning, policy and technology in fire-prone landscapes. Seminal in its field, her work advances biomimetics from the scale of individual organisms to whole ecosystems, offering unprecedented ways of thinking about resilience, adaptation and design.
Published in peer-reviewed journals and presented in keynotes at leading conferences, Dr. Sterry’s research has informed international conversations about fire-adapted design. Her central question — “how can we learn how to live with wildfire from the plants and other organisms that already have?” — is the driving force behind her PhD and its legacy works, including research and publishing platform Panarchic Codex®, and most recently, the Design for Wildfire school and its laboratory, the Firescape Lab™.
What We Share
We publish content that reflects Dr. Sterry’s mission to illuminate, provoke, teach, and connect:
Essays & Writings — explorations into fire ecology, systems thinking, and ecological adaptation, and their application to design.
Films & Visual Stories — visual narratives that bring complex ideas about wildfire and resilience to life.
Podcasts & Interviews — conversations with leading thinkers across design, science, ecology, and technology.
Updates & Research Briefs — news from the Design for Wildfire school, Firescape Lab™ projects, publications, talks, and events.
Whether you’re at the beginning of your learning journey or deep into your research or practice, this Substack offers a place to engage with ideas that challenge convention and point towards a future of designing with nature, not against it.
Our Educational Mission
The Design for Wildfire school is a pioneering hybrid online meets pop-up educational initiative rooted in the ecology of pyrophytes — plants that have evolved to live with fire. Through a unique blend of virtual learning, immersive field experiences, masterclasses and collaborative design studios, the school equips students with the tools and perspectives to rethink architecture, planning, policy, and community resilience for fire-prone environments.
Alongside the school, the Firescape Lab acts as its experimental research arm — a hybrid of digital studio and nomadic field laboratory where speculative prototypes, bio-inspired technologies, and ecosystem-informed processes are developed and tested. Its work here pushes beyond resilience into dynamic, adaptive design that responds to wildfire as a living process rather than a problem to be suppressed.
Learn more at Panarchic Codex®
Join us
Engage with our essays, films, podcasts, and updates. Rethink what it means to design for the Pyrocene — the age of wildfire, not with fear, but with curiosity, creativity, and respect for the intelligence embedded in the living world.
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