Course
Sustainable Design Option Studio 1/3
Instructor
Eva Castro
Federico Ruberto
Student(s) Involved
Clara Chow
Nabila Lasarati Pranoto
Lee Huimin Denise
Daryl Ho Jin Teck
Michel Sim Yi Ting
Kendrick Tay
Tran Thi Thien Tam
Peng Haonan
Tan Shao Xuan
Goh Jun Yang
About The Project
Speculative Approach [Meta-Fiction and Ecology]
We read the (in)tangible lines drawn by geology, energy (resources) and politics and map the invisible, describe the submerged, uncover the concealed … in doing so we design a future.
Designers are in this course strategists, writers, conceptual and morphological explorers. Influences of the lab are the politically driven fictions (such as that of the Russian Cosmists, the Xeno-femminist, the Accelerationist), any “hyperstitional” narrative able to re-invent the present, by having the courage to reimagine-and-live right here and now, the possibility of an-Other future. To design in this course is to map and bring out layers of “controversies”, to form an alternative milieu whence a new reality could germinate. What emerges are works that are politicized at core; designs that have the courage to look onto post-hyper-anthropocentric scenarios and that give now hopes to one primary mission: liberating thought from the enslaving forces that makes it a victim of its own incapacities, and with such liberation imaging new forms of living together on earth, and possibly in a future, in one of its distant horizons.
Testing ground
The South China Sea is the central core of our research, an area that has multiple designations given by the various sovereignties that claim it. Its boundaries arise amidst the shorelines of China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia, Singapore and Vietnam. Within its 3,500,000 square kilometres it contains no more than 15 square kilometres of land distributed within no less than 250 islands, atolls, cays, shoals, reefs, and sandbars; some seasonally submerged, others permanently underwater; some in continuous state of mutation, growing, solidifying.
This term the studio developed 5 leading paths within 5 different geographic locations:
- paleo-netics
- volcanism
- plas.tic.i.ty
- augmented nature
- bodies in exile
