ABOUT UNIDENTIFIED FACILITY
UFƟ (Unidentified Facility Onsite) is a Design Collaboratory (Collaborative-Laboratory), distributing new perspectives on future ecologies and existing / emerging cosmologies through design research, drifting, fieldwork, workshops and experimental ‘broadcasting’. Through connecting a broad global network of practitioners and educators, UFƟ facilitates collaborative acts where distributing knowledge and lived experiences are central to reimagine ecosystems, creative practices and experimental methodologies. UFƟ is a network in networks, continuously connecting, exchanging and supporting experimental, nonlinear thinkers and practitioners around the world.
By using the metaphor of the UFƟ (Ɵ as a metaphor for our onsite nature), we extend our understanding of broadcasting through storytelling, audio, writing, drifting, interventions and investigation all probing new ways forward to support other ways of knowing and learning.
For UFƟ, broadcasting is a method to translate and mediate plural viewpoints and experiences from all stakeholders, enabling holistic views that decentre the self, in order to learn and encompass all viewpoints (human and non-human/ phenomena). As we learn how to take in account, we also learn to form a diversity in the plural communities that we embody.
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UFƟ Design Collaboratory is based on 4 indicators that inform the work we do.
COSMOLOGY (understanding of self, other, place, TIME)
Collective (a shared equal NETWORK)
ECOSYSTEMS (holistic inclusive processes)
Not-Knowing ( as fundament for discovery AND DECENTRING)
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At a time when the future of life on this planet is more uncertain than ever, the urgency of exploring other ways of learning, relating and knowing is pivotal. Our ecosystems, our communities and practices are not static, but continuously evolving as living networks, moving through ecotones and cosmologies. Humans have made the most sudden and long-term impacts on our planet, affecting the potential for healthy holistic ecologies, limiting and often suppressing the potential for symbiotic relationships with the world we are part of. We live in the context of nature, exploring the nature of things and our relationship with the things of nature.
The navigation of future ecosystems requires new approaches that build situated, embedded practice, empathic engagement and non-reductionist approaches. As practice we are in a constant unknown and in-between which are instrumental in processing, learning, exchanging, and enabling new, diverse and liminal practices.
To stimulate curiosity towards new dimensional thinking and practice, UFƟ aims to de-materialise the existing design + research territories and navigate new ways to expand, and extend how ideation evolves and viewpoints expand how its generating new narratives, scenarios and holistic responses.
UFƟ stands for more experimentation and collaboration, more openness in engaging with non-human and unknown phenomena, more alternatives for interweaving knowledge and imagination, more attention to place-based and immersive research and more connected networks of knowledges through species and places.