Caoimhe O’Donnell

Biodiversity is disappearing quietly, and nobody is listening. Domestic Soundscapes is a bioacoustic monitoring system that helps communities detect, track, and advocate for the health of their local ecosystems using sound. Capturing the calls, rhythms, and silences that reveal whether nature is thriving or declining.

Bioacoustic monitoring has long existed in agriculture and commercial ecology, but has been kept at a distance from the places people actually live. As a designer interested in civic infrastructure and technology, I wanted to bring it into the domestic, the communal, the everyday. How can people act on the health of the place they inhabit if they do not know anything is wrong?

A single device in a back garden becomes a quiet act of ecological attention. Many devices across a neighbourhood become a collective record, a community's claim on the place it calls home. Built with transparency, consent, and community ownership at its core.