Thün’s research and creative practice ranges in scale from the regional territory and the city to high-performance buildings, to full-scale prototype-based work exploring responsive and kinetic envelopes that mediate energy, atmosphere, and social space. These operational scales are tied together through a complex systems approach; one that articulates the multiplicity of actors, forces, and contexts surrounding a given situation and leverages these multivalent and sometimes contradictory agents toward integrated and synthetic design work. His academic research has attracted external funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Transportation, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the National Research Council of Canada, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Ontario Power Authority, Guardian Industries, and Ford Motor Company.