UPDATE:

Design Ecologies: the ill defined niche

29th February 2012

Following the recent deadline for the journal, we have had a great response from different contributors around the world on issues of uncertainty, doubt and value of materiality through burgeoning practices in architecture and design.

This is a critical moment for architectural designers, who appear to be unable to respond to a problem and apparent disconnection of progressive affordance and displacement of materiality through the otiose participant in reference to ecology. The way that this method of practice has been propped up has not only impacted on design solutions but has led to a particular understanding of ecology. It is the understanding of ecology as artifact, which has become no longer sustainable and precipitates the crisis. By revisiting the use and application of sentient technologies in architecture as a mutable consequence of designing, it is possible to relieve the problem by opening up the scope for finding new methodological approaches in design that are sufficiently subtle and coherent in their terms, to engage with the open complexity of future discussions on the distributed and enacted human.

Design Ecologies will be the vehicle to traverse it, outlining a way in which we can encounter designing in the world as a system of strange communication that is complex and involving, perched on the edge of tipping points between harmony and dissonance.