This semester, students in the sophomore landscape architecture studio designed an installation for The Museum for Insects in the Peabody Essex Museum. The Museum for Insects is the work of OSU Art Professor Amy Youngs. A museum on a miniature scale, it is inhabited by common house crickets (Acheta domesticus). The work explores relationships between cricket and human; watcher and watched; installation and museum. Students partnered in groups of two to research cricket behavior and habitat requirements. They also studied how the use of various construction materials might address those requirements in innovative and sustainable ways. The groups applied their research to the design process, testing ideas by constructing study models and observing how crickets responded to them. By the end of the project, each group had produced a full scale model of its miniaturized landscape installation. One of these models will be shipped to Massachusetts and installed in The Museum for Insects. This blog features the students’ work.