The emerging proliferation of devices with sensing, networking and computational technologies offers opportunities for delivering pervasive services through interactions between spatially local resources. Here, applications are challenged to become aware of their surroundings: to discover, filter and reason on information relevant to their goals. Without relying on centralised services to control information flow, decentralised mechanisms are required to partition these responsibilities across the environment. This paper explores a bio-chemically inspired approach to realising awareness in an open and dynamic setting, building towards complex self-organising awareness algorithms for data collection, reasoning, and querying. Through simulation we provide a preliminary evaluation of the proposed approach.