Design Laboratory 2009

PLASTIC FUTURES: Emergence, Adaptation and Communities of Tomorrow

Presented by RMIT School of Architecture and Design

Leader - Dr Pia Ednie-Brown, Senior Lecturer, RMIT Architecture. Research Leader, RMIT Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory (SIAL) (Biography)

Saturday 18 July, 10am - 6.30pm
Invitation only

This laboratory is designing a fictional 2049 community based around the environs of Mandurah and Lake Clifton, on the coast of Western Australia. This lake contains examples of microbialites, a form of life that evolved around 3.6 billion years ago. These microbial, growing rock formations (called thrombolites) can arguably be understood as the earth‘s oldest form of architecture. These thrombolites are under threat due to a range of environmental or ecological changes, an issue currently attracting some attention. This and other poignant issues presented by the site offer a vehicle for our research into the value and role of designers in imagining and developing future scenarios.

The project commences with the proposition that just as the significant mutations of everyday life over recent decades has been integrally tied up with innovation in digital communication technologies, a similar trajectory is underway in relation to biotechnologies. Just as mobile phones and touch screens would appear far fetched to someone in 1969, the reality of 2049 might be even more astonishing from our perspective in 2009. It seems more than likely that digital and biotechnological innovations will become increasingly intertwined and infused throughout the realm of domestic everyday life, and that this will incur quite radical alterations of the familiar.

Furthermore, this convergence is occurring in a context of radical global economic, environmental, socio-cultural and political change. We are, in other words, presented with a range of very significant challenges at the very moment when we arguably feel less in control of our destiny than we have for some time, if ever. Models of instrumental control have largely been usurped by emergence: a model of change and evolution defined by the absence of simple cause and effect relations. Given that there is no turning back, global communities are aware that we need to innovate, quickly, in finding ways to guide our future trajectories toward better rather than the worst of imagined futures. It becomes an interesting problem to find ourselves in conditions wherein we are increasingly striving to innovate in preparation for the predicted, rather than for problems already known. In other words, we are finding ourselves attempting to find solutions to problems that haven’t happened yet. As Melinda Cooper has discussed, we face the problem of ‘preempting emergence’.

Our response has been to suggest that we need to focus less on problems, and more on how to work with potential.

COLLABORATORS AND PARTNERS

SIAL, RMIT: Professor Mark Burry, Dr Andrew Burrow.
SymbioticA, UWA: Oron Catts, Director and Ionat Zurr, SymbioticA