Ottonie von Roeder

Experimental designer and educator based in Leipzig, Germany. 

Her practice creates fictional institutions, participatory infrastructures, and speculative services through which alternative social, ecological, and technological futures can be collectively imagined, prototyped  and inhabited.
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       WorkSSelected Works
   Viennese Caviar goes Vegan
   Home Tours
   Post-Labouratory
   Cow&Co
   Motel win-win
   Inside-Out
   La Grande Transformation
   Dream Factory

Selected Teaching  
   2022 Jelly World, Die Angwandte Vienna
   2020/21 Find a Fact & Act, UdK Berlin
   2017 - 2020 Bauhaus Agenten, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau
   2018/19 New Grounds - Neue Gründe, UdK Berlin
   

website currently under construction

Cow&Co

Index

Collaboration with Anastasia Eggers
Post-Fossil City Contest 2017

Cow&Co is a speculative concept featuring a fictional collective of cows that launches its own enterprise. By becoming self-sufficient dairy machines and taking control of milk production and distribution, the project imagines a future in which farm animals become economic actors, challenging conventional ideas of labour, agency, and human–animal relationships while inspiring other farm animals to follow suit.

The cows transform themselves into autonomous milk-producing machines by using methane gas collected from their rumen as fuel to power a milking robot. Moving independently through urban green spaces, they connect directly with customers through an online service that allows people to locate individual cows and collect fresh milk from them. Equipped with welfare sensors, the cows can evaluate their customers while using collected data for their own technical, veterinary, and nutritional maintenance.

By reversing the traditional relationship between humans and farm animals, Cow&Co speculates on alternative systems of production, consumption, and care. The project explores what happens when animals gain technological autonomy and become active participants within economic structures.

Cow&Co was the winner of the International Jury Award 2018 and the Dutch Design Awards 2018 in the category Service & Systems, and was a finalist at the Post Fossil City Contest 2017.

Following the development of Cow&Co, the speculative scenario expanded into further projects exploring alternative relationships between humans and animals involved in agricultural production. These works imagined urban futures in which animals are liberated from industrial agriculture and become autonomous actors, producers, and business partners within shared environments.



Egg to Go
Collaboration with Anastasia Eggers
Vienna Design Week 2019 Egg to Go is an egg take-away run by chickens, offering a glimpse into a fictional city where animals and humans coexist as equal partners. Liberated from the farm, chickens inhabit urban spaces and use smart technologies, their own bodies, and natural resources to independently produce and distribute food.

During Vienna Design Week 2019, the chickens invited urban residents to collect freshly boiled breakfast eggs from their vending machine. Powered by biogas generated from their own manure, the machine became a speculative prototype for a new relationship between animal production, technology, and urban life. The project explored possibilities for reconnecting humans and farm animals while critically reflecting on the environmental and ethical consequences of current animal-product industries.

Beestenbuurt
Collaboration with Anastasia Eggers
Vienna Design Week 2019Beestenbuurt expands this vision into a fictional city where humans and animals traditionally involved in agricultureLiberated from industrial production systems, animals move freely through urban spaces and develop transformative business models that combine agricultural innovation, fabrication technologies, and their own bodies as sources of energy and material.

In this city, animals are no longer perceived only as providers but as equal partners. Sheep produce knitted scarves with robotic support, goats power a cheese manufactory through their movement, insects negotiate their own place of death according to customer needs, and fish offer caviar through new forms of care and interaction. By transforming the city into a shared marketplace between producers and consumers, Beestenbuurt challenges existing systems of animal use and exploitation and questions the future relationships between humans, animals, and production.

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