Critical Ecology Matters

The realization of the systemic entanglement of the questions concerning nature, politics, and design demands a radical rethink of how these concepts are framed within contemporary design discussions. What if the answer to the current environmental crisis is to move beyond a hopeless nostalgia for the environment in favour of developing ecological thought processes? What if, instead of only focusing on macro revolutions that may end up ultimately cynical in the streets, designers also start to focus on the micro revolutionary potential embedded in daily design decisions? Is it possible to move beyond the more systematic modes of dealing with the environmental question to support designers to make sense of design problems’ systemic complexity?

The questions mentioned above were at the crux of Tomás Maldonado’s work between 1956 and 1972. They are central to defining the concept of “critical ecology” in his Book Design, Nature, and Revolution: Towards a Critical Ecology (1972). Due to his fading popularity within Ulm and his struggle with formulating these ideas precisely, his work during this period has gained very little attention. Convinced that the modern university is not suited for developing the necessary modes of imagining the complexity of assembled human-nature relations, he called for different methods of teaching about environmental complexity ( a Bauhaus after Bauhaus). In the face of the multiple crises today, Maldonado’s discourse on critical ecology provides a valuable framework for understanding design imagination as part of a technological imagination that does not lose touch with the sociological imagination. This project aims at a historical reconstruction of the notion of “critical ecology,” as it appeared within Maldonado’s work between 1956 and 1972.

Throughout a semester-long project, we traced his work via engaging with his texts, drawings and listening to those who have already engaged with Maldonado’s work in different ways. Inspired by these sources and ideas in his seminal text Design, Nature, and Revolution, we designed three interactive gaming systems in order to help a broader audience access his main insights.

The source contains the following three games:
(1)Flip it, Towards a Critical Ecology
(2) School of Dialogie. towards an ecological dialogue
(3) Who killed hope