Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century)

A persuasive framework for the digital that has ontological implications is being developed by Benjamin Bratton in San Diego. Bratton’s (2014) concern with the geopolitics of planetary-scale computation leads him to posit the existence of an “accidental megastructure,” the Stack.

Vernacular, in these contexts, no longer indexes a rigid traditionalism but a space of possibility that could be articulated to creative projects integrating vernacular forms, concrete places and landscapes, ecological restoration, and environmental and digital technologies in order to deal with serious problems of livelihood while reinvigorating c

“in the contemporary house, the fireplace has been replaced by the TV” [35]; or, as Bachelard might say, the modern apartment has given up on its oneiric function and is no longer capable of fostering our dreams).

“A building is not an end in itself. A building conditions and transforms the human experience of reality,” he states; “it frames, structures, articulates, links, separates and unites, enables and prohibits”

architects are now taught to design houses, not homes, thus contributing to the uprooting that feeds into our growing inability to genuinely connect with the world. There is a “poetics of home”—linked to memory, emotions, dreams, identity, and intimacy—that functional architecture and “modern living” have foreclosed

Since the inception of the sustainability movement in 1987 with the publication of the Brundtland Report, Our Common Future, where the term sustainable development was first defined as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs (World Commission on Environment and D

to make us aware, before I go on to discuss contemporary design in some detail, of the complex entanglement of science, materials, technologies, capitalism, and culture that makes up the matrix of modern design. My second goal, more pertinently for now, is to highlight the social and cultural histories of the body that surround all design, the fact

contemporary design approaches, she says, are critical, activist, organic, and political; they are about thinkering (thinking with your hands, doing hands-on conceptual work), about problem finding and problem framing more than problem solving, and about functional social fictions rather than science fiction; they are guided by ethics more than by

The notion of a green economy corroborated critics’ view that what is to be sustained with sustainable development, more than the environment or nature, is a particular capitalistic model of the economy and an entire dualist ontology.