Addressing the intricate socio-techno-environmental dimension of noesis within the current climate of social and urban challenges necessitates a transdisciplinary approach. In pursuit of this objective, NWM incorporates contributions that delve into sense-making processes involved in the individuation of humans, technologies, and their affective environments. These contributions offer diverse perspectives that critically examine the production of sense and its heterogeneous potentials for transindividuation. Key questions include: What transductive relations emerge in the entanglements between technology, affects, and the production of our (offloaded) memories and desires? How do these relations shape the sensible apprehension of our lives and the lives of our milieus? In what ways can they be expressed beyond the conventional, Western, ocularcentric, and annotational fixations of generic sciences? What new senses are required to navigate the complexity of the present? And, collectively and technologically, how do we sense the effects of our actions? Drawing inspiration from Gregory Bateson, how can we cultivate a different sensory perspective to foster a transformative mode of thinking?

NWM provides a platform for thinkers who boldly traverse disciplinary boundaries, encompassing a diverse range of fields. These include, but are not limited to, affect and affordance theories, architecture, art and cultural studies, philosophy and philosophy of technology, (digital) media studies, feminist theories, film theory, social sciences, and literature.@en

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 problem seldom neatly fits within a single discipline, nor does it conform to the principle of general equivalence. Handling its irreducibility and non-entailment is a skill possessed by very few. Even fewer take the quasi-causal capacity of what we term the ‘space of technicity’ seriously.

The space of technicity, the shared problem of this volume, is a consequence of immanence. Each configuration of surfaces comprising the built environment produces an intangible effect, acting as a quasi-cause. It can be referred to as downward causation or the timely rediscovery of (neo)finalism.

In this volume it is approached it from the perspective of axiology. The space of technicity allows us to evade techno-determinism without adopting an anything-goes attitude. That which has become manifest could have individuated differently. However, the potential of a body cannot be discerned before intervening in the causal fabric of agential reality to extract the singular points that make certain outcomes more likely than others, surpassing mere probability.

When operating within the ethico-aesthetic paradigm, where sense becomes intricately dependent on sensibility, and vice versa, the volume’s attitude might be said to approximate the Spinozian third kind of knowledge that intuits design (and its space of technicity) beyond mere imagination or reason.

This edited volume was inspired by a virtual round table that exhibited a high degree of resonance among the participants. www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBiBAgxC5FM@en

This book directly links the notion of the commons with different design praxes, and explores their social, cultural, and ecological ramifications. It draws out material conditions in four areas of design interest: social design, commons and culture, ecology and transdisciplinary design. As a collection of positions, the diversity of arguments advances the understanding of the commons as both concepts and modes of thinking, and their material translation when contextualised in the domain of design questions. In other words, it moves abstract social science concepts towards concrete design debates. This text appeals to students, researchers and practitioners working on design in architecture, architecture theory, urbanism, and ecology. @en

Driven by the Foucauldian attitude of subsuming architectural history into a genealogy of techne, Architectures of Life and Death advances a transdisciplinary approach rethinking subjectivity and exploring the political ramifications of these processes for the discipline of architecture and beyond. In contrast to mainstream approaches, architecture will not be seen as representative of culture, but as the mechanism of culture, the ‘collective equipment’ that rests on the reciprocal determination of social habits and technological habitats. In this sense, the idea that we shape our environments, therefore they shape us, is not to be taken as a metaphor. The animate has always been utterly dependent on the inanimate. A livable habitat is one which the inhabitant actively co-evolves with and which does not constitute a ready-made condition to which the inhabitant would simply have to passively adapt.@en

Footprint #28 examines the relation between cybernetics and architecture by focusing on a problem they both share: the production, consumption and flow of information, or, in other terms, of meaning. Therefore, cyberneticisation can set the foundations for a relational account that examines how signs are communicated and how meaning is produced and experienced within systems. This third-order cybernetics extends beyond the original scope of living organisms and their environments in order to include ecologies of ideas, power, institutions, media and so on. In this sense, cyberneticisation is radically environmental, positing the primacy of relations over fixed terms, binary oppositions and linear logics, making it high time for architectural and urban studies to take into consideration its ground-breaking potentials.@en

This issue of Footprint follows a tripartite trajectory regarding formal studies. On the one hand, it includes reflections on the way built form is produced, while, on the other, it gathers studies that examine how architectural form appears in discursive and communicative terms. Finally, it serves as an attractor for multiple inquiries into the different relations that can be established between human actions, understood in the broadest possible terms, and the shape of the built environment. By interrelating these three approaches, the aim is to embrace and braid object-based approaches to form with approaches that examine the reciprocity of formal emergence and studies dealing with in-formation. Emulating Joseph Kosuth’s well-known triptychs, a constant problematisation of architectural form is situated between these three topical interpretations, understood as architecture’s configurative triad. Acting on the threshold of various discursive outlines, the contributions to this issue transverse several kinds of formalisms, highlighting that beyond the limitations of any specific discourse, their heterogeneous assemblage can afford the production of theoretical, methodological and conceptual innovations in the field of contemporary formal studies.@en