Dear Professors Sless,
As you appear genuinely interested in discussing whether
there are failures in planning that lead to situations that are
not just beat ups, and that question the adequacy of the
design profession and design educators and researchers,
challenging designers to come up with new ways of practicing
that might prefigure less worrying futures, I thought that it
might be helpful if you could elaborate on your closing remark
in your initial post, which I suspect people from other cultures
might consider rather obscure and unclear - though I might
just be being too Heideggerian or Derridean in taking it to be
more than just a pleasantry.
"Warm wishes from Melbourne,
where we had 7 mm of rain last night."
Was this a veiled reference to the failures of Melbourne urban
planning and fragmented (non)architectural practices to
adequately conserve water for the present, let alone the future?
(By the way, VEIL, the Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab, is an interest-
ing government/university funded design research initiative headed
up by Chris Ryan, that is attempting to develop some new 'design-
oriented scenario' practices in the context of Victorian sustainability.
The website is under-construction but worth watching if you're
interested: http://www.ecoinnovationlab.com/2007/04/melbourne_2032_.html )
Your reference to the fact that it is now raining in your backyard
could be read in the context of the debate that you have prompted
as an indication that you believe that such rain signals that 'urban
water crises' are a beat up and not a design challenge currently
facing humanity around the globe. Is this the case?
Overall, I think it would help make the discussion more productive
if your made 100 percent clear whether your post is a criticism of
Anne-Marie's grammar or a statement motivated by a wider climate
change scepticism, for example? Is it a complaint about DPP's CFP
or about all the design thinkers who believe that design must get
better at responding to the basic issues now facing humanity, like
Papanek, or John Chris Jones, or Thackara and Manzini, or any of
these organisations:
http://www.worldchanging.com/
http://www.architectureforhumanity.org/
http://www.designfortheworld.org/
Cameron
> I would appreciate if someone could get us back to the more
> interesting issues of failure in planning and fragmentation in
> architecture.
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