“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Thursday, September 29, 2011

Design Ecologies Essay

I've been writing it today. I started reading the essays in the issue (1.2), and was immediately struck by a Latour Litany in the first one I read:

I will present a series of design strategies that generate a spatial complexity informed by the rural environment of a seaside pier, a theatre of the bizarre – a freak show, a chemical photographic process and a cyborg, a storefront in an urban environment. (Yorgos Loizos)

Immediately of course I decided to call the essay “Freak Show Ecology.” I'm enjoying it immensely. My argument? Ecology is a freak show! It's also wonderful to write for designers. As my brief experiences with Cameron Tonkinwise showed me, they are really creative, curious, counter-intuitive people.

No comments: