Learning from the Double Bind of Design and Planning
My talk developed the idea of eco-surrealism as a way of thinking about ecological design, learning and imagination under conditions of crisis. The paper begins from a familiar problem: modern design culture has often been shaped by conscious purpose, technical optimisation and the fantasy of control. Yet the ecological crises we face are not simply technical problems waiting for better solutions. They are symptoms of deeper patterns of perception, habit and organisation. They reveal how ‘purpose’ itself can become pathological – even well intentioned purpose of say ‘ecological planning’ – when it becomes too narrow, too instrumental, or too detached from the wider systems on which it depends.
This becomes especially clear when we ask what it means to plan under conditions of uncertainty. Climate change, social instability, resource stress and ecological degradation do not present designers with a single predictable future. They produce branching and unstable futures, in which any intervention may have unforeseen effects, delayed consequences or contradictory outcomes at different scales. The task of design is therefore not simply to optimise a solution for one assumed future, but to work carefully across multiple possible futures. Scenario thinking becomes important here, not as a corporate forecasting technique, but as an ecological and imaginative worlding or geopoietic practice: a way of holding open different possibilities, testing assumptions, and learning how present actions might resonate within changing circumstances.
Drawing on Gregory Bateson, the paper asks what it would mean to design from within these double binds rather than pretending to stand outside them. Bateson’s work helps us understand ecological crisis as a crisis of learning: a failure to perceive the ‘pattern which connects’, and a tendency to confuse parts with wholes, maps with territories, and short-term fixes with systemic wisdom. His account of levels of learning is central here. Ecological design cannot remain at the level of problem-solving alone. It must also question the frames through which problems are recognised, the habits through which solutions are imagined, and the forms of life that design helps to reproduce.
The ‘surrealist’ dimension of the paper does not mean escapism or irrationality. Rather, it names the importance of chance, dream, play, juxtaposition and non-instrumental practice in breaking open hardened patterns of thought. Historical surrealism sought to disturb the habits of bourgeois reason and reveal other orders of association beneath everyday life. Eco-surrealism suggests new forms of totemistic empathy, and works with our extended ecological unconscious. It asks how design might become more receptive to the unexpected, the more-than-human, and the forms of intelligence that exceed conscious planning.
In this sense, eco-surrealism is also a critique of the impoverishment produced by private property, instrumental reason and capitalist forms of abstraction. Marx’s remark that private property has made us ‘so stupid and one-sided’ becomes newly ecological: we have been trained to perceive the world primarily as resource, commodity or object of management. Against this, eco-surrealism seeks practices that reawaken and transform perception, empathy and responsiveness. It does not reject technique or planning, but places them within a wider ecology of signs, affects, atmospheres, relations and unknowns.
The paper connects these theoretical concerns to my recent work on urban heat, air pollution and evaporative cooling in Athens. The Towers of Winds project explores how architectural prototypes might operate not simply as technical devices, but as public, pedagogical and sensory infrastructures. Heat and pollution are not only measurable environmental conditions; they are also signs through which urban inequalities, atmospheric dependencies and collective vulnerabilities become perceptible. Citizen sensing, public installation, film and experimental making can therefore become part of a broader ecological learning process.
Eco-surrealism, then, is not a style. It is a proposal for a different mode of ecological imagination and perception: one that combines critical theory, systems thinking, experimental design, scenario thinking and poetic practice. It suggests that in a time of climate emergency, we need not only better instruments, but stranger and wiser forms of attention.
