CREATIVITY GAME

Design has always been influenced by external conditions. Transformative context and its growing intricacy have constantly been expressed by design products. When the evolution of complexity arrives to its culmination, the designer leaves reductive and dysfunctional schemes, rigid mind-sets and fragmented way of thinking where everything is broken up into bits, and adopts new maps of knowledge and doing which enable abstract, sophisticated and randomized interpretations of context. The understanding of design thus extends beyond simplified, liner-based interpretations.



The wholeness is an attitude for understanding the world in its complexity of delicate interrelationships among parts. Design is the inseparable part of a whole. The paradigm shift is not anthropocentric; it doesn’t separate humankind from other species and nature but integrates it inside the natural system. Therefore it is necessary to think of design as part of the natural system and to establish a broader understanding of its relationship with the environment. The geometrical, spatial, artistic, technical and functional aspects altogether represent the groundwork of the design process. Moreover, this process is influenced by outer factors, such as the social-environmental-economic context. The production of design is always the outcome of an effort to make internal and external characters interacting with each other. Hence, if the design is a system of interrelated features, then we should accordingly acknowledge the importance of developing new design tools enabling us to deal with its complexity. Designing requires the ability to cope with social, environmental and economical issues. Are we really able to produce a project which successfully integrates aesthetic and technical characters with environmental and societal complexity? How does a single project adapt to non-linear dynamics of overall changes? How do we establish a balance between the necessity to last and overall accelerating transformations? Can a project simulate the complex evolution and refinement of a natural system? In this simulation, does vernacular mean more than a nostalgic remembrance?



WHY THIS SPECIAL ISSUE ON THEORY BY DESIGN SYSTEMS?

Design Systems identify obstacles, constrains and potentiality by exploring either endangered or visionary environments, low or smart technologies, and challenging spatial game plans. Characterised by systemic thinking, adaptability and playability, Design Systems are able to explore new capacities of spatial systems to invent and fabricate alternative scenarios for dwelling through political drifts, ecological repairs, environmental synergies and structural manoeuvres. Being based on experimentalism, and rather prospective than retrospective, Design Systems continuously face the indeterminacy.



AIMS AND SCOPES

The papers contributing to this special issue of the journal Creativity Game aim to: reflect on manifestations of design (re)making in the built environment; underpin the design process over outcomes within the context of practices versus academia; bridge the gap between radical oeuvre, interfacing and design systems; discover and define new spatial concepts in the process of (re)making; augment the awareness of universal design, 'we-all-are-designers' approach, open source architecture and systemic thinking; elevate attributes of insights, understanding and knowing of total design as process-driven radical production; and to explore the dialogues between cognitive and sensorial experiences of design systems in open design studios.

OVERVIEW OF PAPERS

The discussion on benefits of a contemporary pedagogical synergic format involving both online and in class learning, picturesquely supported with findings of experimental course Architectural Design Methodology, implemented last spring at the National Technical University of Athens, is presented by Olga Ioannou. The author demonstrates the need to reconceptualise architectural design courses by introducing new learning variables and renegotiating the existing ones accordingly.

Author Velimir Stojanović explores in his manuscript the causes and consequences of the cycle of changes of urban morphology in urban theory and practice. Cycles of change in urban morphology have a historical dimension effecting the change of both the last and current morphological conditions. In doing so, the author explains the alienation of historical flows trends.

Minas Bakalčev and co-authors Saša Tasić, Violeta Baklačev and Mitko Hadzi Pulja analyze the phenomenon of Urban Lines as systems that create inter-dependences, inter-conditionalities and suppressions, experiencing in their traces certain logic of control. All in all, the paper proposes project strategies from the studio ‘Residential Transformations’, as academic answer to the topic.

This special edition called “Theory by design systems” culminates with a review in which the author Maurizio Bradaschia presents the interaction between project and theory in the perspectives that characterize great movements of thought of historical period; these paradigms are useful to guide the scientific and every other type of research.
 
Literature and sources:
Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an Ecology of Mind.San Francisco: Chandler Pub. Co.