A symbiosis between ecology and digital design methodologies has led to an emergent, fertile ground for design practice. PG15 feels the need to redefine and catalyse a discourse on the discipline and its relationships with the environmental challenges of this time, where both the old and even the near-future of design-thinking are incessantly entering obsolescence. The unit aims to question the viability of the Earth system while framing a discourse for an expanded ecology in the context of planetary urbanisation, in which global ecology has become a capital-driven process.

How is ecological knowledge produced, observed and culturally disseminated? How does our architecture learn, and what is its capacity to learn? We are interested in complex physical systems, morphogenesis and ecological dynamics. We engage with time-oriented modelling techniques and prospective design-thinking.

What is ecology? How do we understand it and how does architecture? This year students developed and informed their architectural research and design practice in relation to individual understandings of ecology. We asked questions such as: can soil be a living, live-in organism? Can it be an agent of our architecture? Can we design material systems to be responsive, informed and symbiotic with community desires and socio-economic and environmental agents? How can we be prospective, mindful of data-driven intelligence and poetically sensitive to the consciousness of potential ecological change? We have attempted to build anti-globally and have looked outwards anthropocentrically while simultaneously peeking into the haunted crevices of deep time.

Our sites this year have taken us from the Mekong Delta in southern Vietnam to an archipelago in the Caribbean Sea; from Dobrotino, Bulgaria to Southend in Essex, and back to London. Mapping, digitisation and simulation have been examples of instrumental processes to help express the extent of our research reach and tease at discrete student design methodologies. We will continue to explore digital intelligence, working towards informed, emergent architectures and expanding ecologies.