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

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.

The work of Bernard Stiegler (1952–2020) provides invaluable material for rethinking the built environment as a sort of inorganic spatial memory that enables the evolution of life by means other than organic life. Following Stiegler’s theoretical turn toward epiphylogenetic processes, Footprint 30 is devoted to revisiting the built environment as middling between individuating technical ensembles and niche construction processes. It offers a platform to the transdisciplinary field of posthuman scholarship dealing with existential niches from a technological angle and the concomitant architectural thought that advances such speculative recasting.

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.

First, let us briefly take you through a glossary to situate this neo-materialist project, starting with the three Cs. The first two – critical and clinical – are directly appropriated from Gilles Deleuze’s Essays Critical and Clinical. Already in 1988 Deleuze revealed his long-standing plan to write a series of studies on writers as great symptomatologists under the overarching label ‘Critique et Clinique’. The collection of essays was published five years later. In his English translation from 1997, Daniel W. Smith offered a rare commentary on this aspect of Deleuze’s thought. It was only in 2010 that the journal Deleuze Studies devoted an issue to the topic of Deleuze and the Symptom, edited by Aidan Tynan, with the subtitle On the Practice and Paradox of Health. Please note the two new additions to our glossary, namely, the symptom and health. There is a certain divergence in Deleuze’s conception of the clinical, Tynan explains. If in the symptomatological register the symptom is diagnostic and relates to the creation of new clinical entities, in the schizoanalytical mode it is therapeutic with an injunction to produce. Schizoanalytical practice is attuned to desiring-production and as such repudiates the philosophical and psychoanalytic tie to a hidden meaning to interpret. In other words, health already implies practice, insofar as signs imply ways of living, forms of life. [...]

Discusses the newly emerging discourses between architecture and bio-medicine Critical and Clinical Cartographies rethinks medical and design pedagogies in the context of both the Affective and Digital Turns that are occurring under the umbrella of New Materialism. This collection is framed through Deleuze’s symptomalogical approach which creates the ideal terrain for architecture and medical technologies of care to meet with robotics, alongside the newly emerging ‘materialist landscape’. A number of questions emerge, which are addressed across the collection. • What is the impact of the Digital Turn on the contemporary medical and architectural education and/or practice? • How does the Posthuman Turn influence the possible convergence of medical and architectural education and/or practice? • How has the biopolitical concept of care mutated under the proliferation of digital technology? • How could medical research contribute to architectural design and how could design, in turn, contribute to the improvement of health care?

The 2017 edition titled A Grin without a Cat will be devoted to the concept of pedagogies. It starts from the premise that what we learn is inextricably linked to how we learn it. Dichotomies such as content and form, figure and ground, or inside and outside, serve no purpose. It is the task of educators to integrate de-stratification and immanent approaches into pedagogical practices that should include the design of education itself. Papers concerning these and related issues will be presented at the conference.
Of special interest are papers exploring the intersection of education and semiotics. It is neither the materiality of the sensuous body, nor the incorporeality of signs, which render meaning, but a space of reciprocal determination. Deleuze calls this intensive space, or spatium, the ‘body without organs’. BwO is not the body, but the very process of de-re-territorialisation, i.e. embodiment. Here comes the formula, a prescribed pedagogy if you will: ‘To make the body a power which is not reducible to the organism, to make thought a power which is not reducible to consciousness.’