Responding to increasing levels of planetary pollution, waste generation, carbon dioxide emission and environmental collapse, Ecologies of Inception re-thinks potentiality—an object’s ability to change—in architecture and design. The book problematizes the still-prevailing modern paradigm of design practice: the technical tabula rasa, a tendency to begin from scratch and use raw, amorphous, and obedient materials that can be easily and effectively manipulated, facilitating a seamless and faithful embodiment of intentions. Instead, the philosophy of design developed in the text prompts—through a variety of case studies, thinkers, and disciplines—a collective reconsideration of value, dissociating it from the projects and signatures of any one author or generation. Whereas the merits of up-cycling and circular design are canonically defined vis-à-vis status-quo economic and socio-cultural orthodoxies, this project unpacks the theoretical assumptions that underpin these practices, showing that they perpetuate the same biases and exclusions that generate waste in the first place. As an alternative, the book introduces a nodal and exaptive paradigm for design: a conceptual and methodological toolset for engaging the durational and anthropocenic materiality of the third millennium, and for radically prioritizing practices of maintenance, reuse, care, and co-option. This approach, which is inspired by (and builds upon) evolutionary biology, technological disobedience, queer use, adaptive reuse, experimental preservation, and improvisational practices such as collage, adhocism, bricolage, and kit-bashing, refuses to reduce pre-existing material substrates to abstract lists of properties or featureless lumps, encountering them on their own terms—as situated individuals and co-authors. Ecologies of Inception will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, educators, and professional architects and designers interested in sustainable design and seeking to develop conceptual and design tools commensurate with the magnitude and urgency of the climate emergency.
Over the past ten years, Organs Everywhere (Œ) has promoted conversations that approach architectural design from the edges of the discipline -- testing its boundaries, technologies, methods and (e)valuation systems, and keeping them unstable. It has valued transdisciplinary, speculative and irreverent explorations over strict publishing formats and academic purity, promoting a profanatory and open-ended ethos. Each issue has strung together disparate organs and limbs, activating precarious couplings and associations, and testing new metabolisms and assemblages. And so does the first volume of Œ Case Files continue its commitment to the making and unmaking of monsters, both by anthologising past contributions into fresh configurations and designs, and by combining them with entirely new articles and voices. Here, philosophers, designers, experimental architects, artists, science fiction writers, activists, and poets shift, expand and re-imagine notions of space, time, inhabitation, technology, knowledge, use, value and experience. A patchwork of essays, stories, design experiments, buildings, art installations, drawings, prose poems, photographs and speculative projects collide in the book, infecting simple disciplinary orthodoxies with doubt and potentials, uncertainty and hope -- indecisive photons and softness; metatactility and haunted houses; neurodiversity and protocells; prosthetics, grease and darkness; post-human scenographies, software and GPS anklets; anthropocenic devices, paprika and synthetic biology.
Over the past ten years, Organs Everywhere (Œ) has promoted conversations that approach architectural design from the edges of the discipline -- testing its boundaries, technologies, methods and (e)valuation systems, and keeping them unstable. It has valued transdisciplinary, speculative and irreverent explorations over strict publishing formats and academic purity, promoting a profanatory and open-ended ethos. Each issue has strung together disparate organs and limbs, activating precarious couplings and associations, and testing new metabolisms and assemblages. And so does the first volume of Œ Case Files continue its commitment to the making and unmaking of monsters, both by anthologising past contributions into fresh configurations and designs, and by combining them with entirely new articles and voices. Here, philosophers, designers, experimental architects, artists, science fiction writers, activists, and poets shift, expand and re-imagine notions of space, time, inhabitation, technology, knowledge, use, value and experience. A patchwork of essays, stories, design experiments, buildings, art installations, drawings, prose poems, photographs and speculative projects collide in the book, infecting simple disciplinary orthodoxies with doubt and potentials, uncertainty and hope -- indecisive photons and softness; metatactility and haunted houses; neurodiversity and protocells; prosthetics, grease and darkness; post-human scenographies, software and GPS anklets; anthropocenic devices, paprika and synthetic biology.
Responding to increasing levels of planetary pollution, waste generation, carbon dioxide emission and environmental collapse, Ecologies of Inception re-thinks potentiality—an object’s ability to change—in architecture and design. The book problematizes the still-prevailing modern paradigm of design practice: the technical tabula rasa, a tendency to begin from scratch and use raw, amorphous, and obedient materials that can be easily and effectively manipulated, facilitating a seamless and faithful embodiment of intentions. Instead, the philosophy of design developed in the text prompts—through a variety of case studies, thinkers, and disciplines—a collective reconsideration of value, dissociating it from the projects and signatures of any one author or generation. Whereas the merits of up-cycling and circular design are canonically defined vis-à-vis status-quo economic and socio-cultural orthodoxies, this project unpacks the theoretical assumptions that underpin these practices, showing that they perpetuate the same biases and exclusions that generate waste in the first place. As an alternative, the book introduces a nodal and exaptive paradigm for design: a conceptual and methodological toolset for engaging the durational and anthropocenic materiality of the third millennium, and for radically prioritizing practices of maintenance, reuse, care, and co-option. This approach, which is inspired by (and builds upon) evolutionary biology, technological disobedience, queer use, adaptive reuse, experimental preservation, and improvisational practices such as collage, adhocism, bricolage, and kit-bashing, refuses to reduce pre-existing material substrates to abstract lists of properties or featureless lumps, encountering them on their own terms—as situated individuals and co-authors. Ecologies of Inception will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, educators, and professional architects and designers interested in sustainable design and seeking to develop conceptual and design tools commensurate with the magnitude and urgency of the climate emergency.
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