Beyond Silicon: How a Living Thermostat Re-imagines Smart Design

Rethinking Smartness Through a Living Thermostat

In an era where "smart" often means silicon, speed, and surveillance, designer Jasper Scheffer invites us to consider a radically different future: one where intelligence grows slowly, organically, and in relationship with living systems.

Jasper is a 23-year-old Eindhoven-based designer from Utrecht, with a focus on rethinking human-technology interaction through bio-based design. His work explores how living systems can shape our understanding of intelligence, care, and cohabitation in everyday life.

The graduation project, Thermocelium, is not your typical smart device. Developed as part of Jasper's Final Bachelor Project, it takes the form of a living thermostat made from Reishi mycelium. Instead of tracking temperature in numbers or triggering climate control systems, Thermocelium grows visibly, responding to warmth in its environment.

The more heat, the more mycelial bloom. The result is an object that senses without calculating and invites presence instead of precision.

Designing with Life, Not Just for Humans

The project contributes to the field of design for cohabitation, where designers work not only for human convenience but also with and alongside non-human life forms. The central research question:

This question drives Thermocelium's speculative premise. By integrating fungal growth into a home device, Jasper disrupts the dominant model of smartness, which often equates intelligence with efficiency, control, and automated feedback loops. In contrast, Thermocelium proposes smartness as attunement: intelligence grounded in slowness, subjectivity, and care.

A Week of Symbiosis: Living With Thermocelium

Rather than stopping at fabrication, Jasper took a research-through-design and autoethnographic approach. He lived with Thermocelium for seven days, observing its gradual changes and reflecting on how the presence of this living artifact shifted his relationship with heat, attention, and "smart" objects.

The object doesn't do anything in the traditional sense. Instead, it invites noticing. It becomes a quiet cohabitant, making the invisible visible, and returning thermal experience to the realm of felt life.

From Automation to Attention

Jasper's findings illuminate a design paradigm shift:

• From automation to attunement

• From optimization to observation

• From passive consumption to relational care

During Demo Day, visitors engaged with the object as both tool and organism. Some were enchanted. Others hesitant. All were provoked. Through conversation and interaction, Thermocelium opened up discourse about what intelligence could mean beyond apps, dashboards, and performance.

Aesthetics, Ethics, and the Role of Storytelling

Designing with fungi isn't just a technical challenge, it's ethical and narrative too. Jasper notes that aesthetics and storytelling are crucial in helping users relate to living artifacts not as gadgets, but as cohabitants.

Thermocelium isn't a product to be optimized. It's a proposal, a provocation to rethink our cultural scripts around intelligence, environment, and technology. It foregrounds the challenges of working with living matter (decay, maintenance, interpretation) while offering a poetic alternative to data-driven design.

Toward More-than-Human Futures

Jasper's project stands as a concrete contribution to more-than-human design discourse. At a time when smart home devices multiply and silently surveil, Thermocelium offers an alternative: a living, growing, feeling object that resists quantification.

Thermocelium is not a product. It is a shift in perspective.

It suggests a future where smartness is not outsourced to silicon, but grown through relationship, where we design not just for efficiency, but for entanglement.

We thank Jasper for his time and generosity in sharing his work with us.

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