Precedents: 

Ant Farm, Environmints, 1970

We were inspired by different inflatable architectures and how they create these contained environments. Along with creating walls and ceiling, the landscape of the ground can also be changed and modified. For example, bouncy castles are inflatable environments where the floor is structured to provide adequate support for a human to jump around. In thinking of how we imagined our biome to flourish on its own with minimal tending, we were inspired to think about how individual inflated chambers could be altered to provide ideal growing conditions and reproduce processes such as decomposition in a closed environment. During the prototyping phase, we also looked at other inflatable objects in our everyday lives. One example that we used was water wings which is typically used for swimming assistance. Inspired by the ability of water wings to stay on an arm, we used its design as a basis for creating an inflatable artery, a tube that can constrict flow based on the inflation of the tube.