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ISSUE 01:  Radical Sustainability; Design & Decay

Contact  

cheyennedcosta@gmail.com
cheyennedcosta (at) gmail (dot) com

Radical Observations of Thought (ROT) Magazine is a not-for-profit curatorial platform. Design interacts with many adjacent disciplines, such as the construction industry, the public sector, research, and innovation. We aim to promote critical discussion and discourse between young designers and industry professionals with a variety of experiences.

Contributors will engage with difficult and sensitive questions through provocations on the built environment, object design, and culture. Design and design research is often exclusionary, alienating even the intended audience, and limiting the impact of design outcomes and their real-world applications. We aim to foster engagement with new perspectives, encouraging emerging practitioners to expand independent knowledge acquisition.


ROT Magazine acknowledges that we work, live, and practice on stolen lands and that the sovereignty of these lands was never ceded. We will strive to move towards reciprocal relationships with Traditional Owners and First Nations people of this land.

ROT Magazine Issue 01: Radical Sustainability; Design and Decay will bring together a series of short essays and interviews focusing on the relationship between built design and ecological decay. Written texts will discuss topics such as critical sustainability theory, materiality, maintenance and activism. In this day and age, how do things like culture, systems of development, politics, infrastructure and education shape the building industry? This issue gives aspiring young designers the opportunity to ask a range of industry professionals to unpack systemic issues, and propose more ecological approaches to the built environment.


The conversation surrounding climate decay in Melbourne has become increasingly pessimistic or blindly optimistic, two narratives that are utilised to evoke a targeted response, neither of which productively address the contingencies of designing with a future in mind. This publication sets the table for these contradicting ideologies to be reimagined - how can we reframe our perspectives and consider what we can do, within our means in this climate?


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