Forum: resilience & design

Abstract

This forum aims to encourage theorists of resilience to engage more closely with different aspects of design theory and practice. The introduction outlines a series of largely unacknowledged parallels between resilience and design, relating to the valorisation of processes over states, the loss of faith in ‘planning’, the ambivalent status of boundaries and interfaces, and open-ended political possibilities. Four short reflections then follow on various design-related topics: the significance of the ‘wicked problem’ in contemporary urban planning and design, and the urbanisation of responsibility; design’s potential to repoliticise and engender new forms of responsibility; the significance of the digital interface and the condition of everyday life in the ‘unplanned’ post-colonial city. Readers are invited to build on or refute the explicit and implicit links made between resilience and design in the various forum contributions.

Keywords:

• Design thinking
• wicked problems
• resilience
• design interfaces
• Kinshasa
• Cape Flats Nature

Acknowledgements

This forum grew out of presentations and discussions at an exploratory conference on ‘Design After Planning: Examining the Shift from Epistemology to Topology’, funded jointly by the University of Westminster Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment and by the Centre for the Study of Democracy, on 5 February 2016; and from a workshop on ‘Defetishising the City’ held at the University of Westminster on 28 April 2016, sponsored by the Centre for the Study of Democracy. We would like to thank all the participants at both events for their contributions.

Notes

1. These are a selection of signals taken from the different scenarios of dashboard use I opened with.