Dulmini Perera

Bauhaus-Universität Weimar · Fakultät Architektur und Urbanistik

Design methods need to reconsider ways to avoid othering messiness (or what appears to be contradictory or nonsensical) within wicked problem situations, particularly crisis sites. As such, this paper suggests that play frames (defined as Fun Machines) can be utilised as situated strategies that designers can apply to address paradoxes and contradi...

Whether considered in its more specific forms such as the environmental or, refugee crisis, or as an implicit reality of the daily muddles within the practice of architecture, crisis events are instances where a system’s wicked properties become most apparent. According to Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, when considering wickedness as an inherent q...

Annetta Pedretti vs. a world out of time: Explorations in cybernetics, design and futures

This paper critically reflects on the problematic relationship between design innovation and design defuturing. Design innovation is broadly understood as a field of knowledge, a mode of organising research around design and a form of design practice linked to dominant and colonising fictions of technology and progress. Design defuturing foreground...

ABSTRACT In this paper, I propose second-order design fictioning as a way of reframing the hegemonic fictions built around technology, work, and design. These forms of progress fictions are further amplified by uncritical developments in cybernetic technologies that have a complex and often problematic relationship to discourses around the politics...

Desperate times demand optimistic transdisciplinary measures. This volume unites a select group of thinkers who courageously traverse disciplinary boundaries. What brings them together is the least stratified ‘component’: a shared problem. It is a widely recognised that a problem gets the solution it merits. However, only a few acknowledge that a p...

The dataset presents the Multi-Scale More-than-Human Atlas Gigamapping Workshop output that should evaluate and suggest new developments of COLife project prototyping. We also gathered the ecological check data and planted new species with gardening and seedbombs. This was all elaborated in the workshop and speculated on within the 'Enacting Bateso...

The gap between the limited human sense of how living entities change over time and the ways in which living systems change is one of the most potent uncertainties in ecological knowledge. This gap remains a significant source of problems and errors for those working with the transformations of living systems. This article foregrounds Mary Catherin...

The dataset covers codesign gigamapping data and the 3d parametric models from Rhino 3d of a set of responsive wood insect hotels with pollinator's gardens from the year 2022/23. The first set of gigamaps are for the first intervention POL-AI1, the second for its iteration POL-AI2 within the 'Enacting Bateson Ecological Aesthetics in Architecture a...

This paper critically reflects on the problematic relationship between design innovation and design defuturing. Design innovation is broadly understood as a field of knowledge, a mode of organising research around design and a form of design practice linked to dominant and colonising fictions of technology and progress. Design defuturing foreground...

The consensus among various stakeholders of society that automation will influence the future of work has risen considerably in the post-Corona context. Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, who are critical of how a minority uses consensus about facts to maintain an existing common sense (a fiction) around the concepts of work and labour, suggest that a...

While there have been significant discussions about the relevance of cybernetics within architectural and urban studies, the focus has mainly been on computing and digital practices. Since its emergence in the post-war period, cybernetics – in both its first and second-order versions – has introduced to architectural discourse systematic design met...

What are the uses of cautionary tales to the design imagination? The text introduces How to Live in a Modern Flat, a less known cautionary tale produced by Heath Robinson and K.R.G Browne that, through humor, attempts to frame the complicated relationship between design problems and modern architectural solutions. Cautionary tales do not seek conse...

After work" is an invitation to explore the impact of the changes in work-life in the post-corona context and its effect on the broader political, social, and economic functions of the European city via design fictions. The design fictions are based on the premise that automation and the disappearing offices (office-based work) have a more extended...

While there have been significant discussions about the relevance of cybernetics within architectural and urban studies, the focus has mainly been on computing and digital practices. Since its emergence in the post-war period, cybernetics – in both its first and second-order versions – has introduced to architectural discourse systematic design met...

The term ‘design space’ implies that the particular space of possibilities within any evolving system always has a sort of transformative ‘elbow room’ for things to unfold. Yet such space of possibilities for future evolutions is itself designed depending on the system’s past evolution. In this regard, it can be understood as an enabling constraint...

On the 14th of April 2017, the Meethotumulla trash dump in Colombo, Sri Lanka (a garbage mountain covering 9 hectares exceeding 60 meters in height) collapsed resulting in 32 recorded deaths and displacing 965 people living in the adjacent slum areas. Meetotmulla is an example of wicked problems and the many interrelated questions of environmental...

The Call for Contributions for Footprint 28 is out now. Stavros Kousoulas and Dulmini Perera will be the editors of this issue, dedicated to the theme "All is in Formation: Architecture, Cybernetics, Ecology". This issue of Footprint seeks to explore the encounters between architecture and cybernetics in an attempt to rethink the notion of the bu...