Design Fundamentals, The Postdigital, and the Anthropocene

In the past several decades, design has been impacted by the digital revolution as well as by a series of challenges linked to the advent of a new era in the relationship between the humans and planet earth, an era often characterized as the Anthropocene. This situation necessitates the need to rethink some of the fundamentals of the design disciplines, including: their relationship to nature as well as to space and time, questions of scale, tectonics and ornament, what is implied by the notion of inhabiting and its link to issues of subjectivity. Finally, the political relevance of design is more than ever at stake.

This research seminar will envisage these issues at the intersection of theory and history, history being mobilized to understand better some of the changes that are currently unfolding. For this is not the first time that the design disciplines, beginning with architecture, have had to change their frame of reference. The Renaissance, the late 18th century and the dawn of modernism witnesses profound changes in architectural and urban design. We may be at the brink of a new series of transformations, as profound if not even more so than those which marked these previous episodes.

Topics may include:

• Architecture, Cities, and the Question of Nature
• Form/Process/Event: Design as a Mode of Action
• The Crisis of Scale and the Rise of New Spatial and Temporal Frames
• Should We Get Rid of Tectonics or Rather Reinvent It?
• Artificial Intelligence and Architectural Intention
• Architecture, Cities, and the Posthuman
• Design and Politics Today