Editorial - STEDEX '10

STEdex’10 collects artefacts in exploring the meaning of production, thinking and process that pervade the terrain of dialectical paradigm with a new meaning of ‘time space of sustainability’. STEdex’10 pulls together artefacts that in over a year have attempted to make sense of this emerging arena with most essays adopting a bird’s-eye view in looking at what are often called ‘sustainable’ and ‘being tropical’. In our realm, a tropical sustainability meaning focuses on ecological and biological pattern and social fairness. We take the stand that sustainability extends across global citizenship. Herewith, it is the search for a civilisation that is capable of extending hospitality to twice as many people on the planet as today without ruining our present biosphere for the successive generations.

Sustainable development in this perspective is about searching for local livelihoods. It is searching for a decentralised and non accumulationcentred forms of society involves in the process of regenerating such communal behaviour and social fairness in a situation of place and matter. Nationally, for example, sustainable lifestyles for the urban middle classes would give peasantry and tribal communities more control over their resources. These sources are being expressed through critical observations and translating those imaginations into ‘real’ things. As part of our vision, the formulated expression is provided through texts that are theorised through creative explorations and site propositions. They synthesise a place or a function into a certain significance through elaboration of the visual mind and reasoning.

This year’s exhibits also include collaborative contributions from the industrial design field giving more excitement to the pages. Their artefacts are cutting edge design proposals that are based on cosmopolitan localism. These products energised the Industrial Age that travelled against time and dimension for equipping humans. They use resources of biological and industrial time in which, design becomes an intention of intellectual activities facilitated by knowledge, imagination and intuition. In their attempts to construct and determine the future or to search for some order in potentially existing matter of time and emotions; the basic functions and technologies have been driven through the magical border between the present moment, the unknown and the undetermined. It is a proposition of scale and function which presents the mode of living, behaving and embodying the ambience towards

STEdex’10 starts with an essay about cultural design approach. It is followed by a collection of selected artefacts from three departments: Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Industrial Design. A special chapter is included to showcase outstanding studio works that have won local and international accolades. In all, the writings and the descriptions of the text are dialogues manifesting the condition of time and conceptual operation in designing a need and reaction to change. They respond to positions taken by others, putting a message across to an imaginary audience and they converse an author’s conversation with himself when looking—either consciously or unconsciously—into his own culture and environment and their social acts.