The Ill-Defined Niche

What is it about?

Design Ecologies 2.1: the ill-defined niche will be focusing on ‘doubt’ and the ‘value’ of designing. As you will know there are many burgeoning practices that go beyond the making and designing of the object, towards an experience of architecture with the environment. This issue of Design Ecologies aims to shift and decentralize the designing part and focus on a more specific idea of the design in the environment – creating a sort of ill-defined niche for burgeoning practices. Practice that goes beyond shaping geometry, to shaping the internal structure of material – making materials within materials, and embedding and weaving multiple materials into complex projects.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

All the works presented in this issue have an understanding that form cannot be fully explained in terms of their material constituents and the energy within them. The form seems to be something over and above the material components that make it up, but at the same time it can be expressed only through the organization of matter and energy. The idea is that we should Not begin with a precise location but starts instead with an ill defined location and then explore its logical capacity in interacting with the environment through design practice in the manner of a refined intuitionism. If design is a systematic and optimal navigation endowed with universal orientation, the starting point should not be precise (well coordinated) but instead, it should be modally ill defined so as it provide your stance (i.e. navigational course in the system of knowledge) with rich non-given forms of interaction, global-local synthesis, fusion, multimodal confrontation with the network.