An Unfinished Cyclopedia Lydia Kallipoliti The term ecological design was coined in a 1996 book by Sim van der Ryn and Stewart Cowan, in which the authors argued for a seamless integration of human activities with natural processes to minimize destructive environmental impact. However, ecological design harks as far back as Ernst Haeckel’s definition of the field of ecology and Henry David Thoreau’s manual for self-reliance. Since World War II, contrary to the position of ecological design as a call to fit harmoniously within the natural world, there has been a growing interest in a form of synthetic naturalism, where the laws of nature and metabolism are displaced from the domain of wilderness to the domain of cities, buildings, and objects. With the rising awareness of disturbances in the planetary reservoir, the field of ecological design has signified not only the integration of the designed object or space in the natural world,