Towards an Ecology of Making

The material experience and engagement of contemporary form-making, as a confluence of aggregate material-component systems, must be critically examined to (re)establish the act of making as a form of critical reflection, theoretical inquiry, and resistance towards the globalizing tendencies of consumer culture and the aesthetic & technical instrumentality of parametric culture. The current proliferation of procedural, serial production and pattern-based surface systems must be examined within the larger cultural sphere of production, re-centering the designer and maker within a “rational-humanist” framework of “Critical Fabrication & Ecologies of Making.”