Over the last decade, we have witnessed renewed interest in design as a socially engaged practice. Much of the debates around ‘social design’ point towards myriad approaches and disciplinary fields interwoven with grass-roots initiatives and social movements. Among these, design activism has gained traction as critical spatial practice that operates on the fringes of commercial and institutional spheres.

The temporal, spatial and experimental nature of design activism is well delineated in scholarship but its long-term effect on everyday urban environments remains elusive. Moreover, the influence of design activism on socio-spatial dynamics is indeed largely under researched. By mobilising social practice theory, this paper proposes a novel theorisation of design activism that sheds light on the social formations and collective practices catalysed through the activist impulse. This ontological shift embraces an understanding of the socio-material world through practice. Such characterisation of design activism underscores collective moments of integration of the constitutive elements of practice, encapsulated by Shove, Pantzar and Watson as ‘material, competence and meaning’.

The authors' own empirical research, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) in the UK, reveals design activism as necessarily intertwined with other everyday practices – gardening, celebrating, playing – that coalesce around a shared sense of citizenship. It also advances the role of design activism in forging communities of practice: mutually supportive and self-sustaining groups emerging out of the personal relations sustained and organised around a practice of place making.

This article argues that the UK’s vanguard magazine Architectural Design (AD) promoted appropriate technology (AT) to prompt ‘architectural thinking’ about the late-modern crisis following the collapse of post-War consensus in the welfare state and its architecture. This was to be a crisis settled by the decade’s end in postmodernism and neoliberalism, a new consensus so overwhelming that it was heralded even in AT, especially those variants drawn from the Californian libertarianism of the Whole Earth Catalog. But British AT was also drawing from the UK’s eco-socialist Radical Technology group and its publication, whose chief artist, anarchist Clifford Harper, and editor Peter Harper, contributed to AD. At the beginning of the decade, the magazine’s sub-editor Martin Pawley insisted on the role of a lateral ‘architectural thinking’ of the sort inherent to AT, which pointed to futures by turn libertarian, socialist, and social democratic (its first advocate, Ernst Schumacher, had been a stalwart Keynesian and manager of nationalisation). Beyond politics per se, paradox and analogy were keynote to the decade’s epistemological uncertainty, from the ‘wickedness’ besetting design as a ‘problem-solving’ activity, to a post-structuralism eroding the long Enlightenment project, to a post-colonialism challenging Eurocentric technologies of exploitation. Indeed, AD could position design and AT as ‘non-aligned third way’ much as the so-called Third World indicated a ‘third way’ between the capitalism and communism of the so-called First and Second Worlds.

This article unveils and discusses a series of unknown photographs of the empty site in which Mies and Lilly Reich's 1929 German Pavilion in Barcelona had been built and dismantled, and shot by Ludwig Glaeser, curator of the Mies van der Rohe Archive at MoMA in 1979. It suggests that more than the manifestation of a desire to rematerialise the building through the agency of photography, Glaeser's photographs are, photographs of dust, but more importantly, a manifestation of the possibility of re-enacting the widely known 1929 Berliner Bild-Bericht photographs.

Half a decade past the consolidation of the first ‘digital turn’ in architecture, contemporary designers seem to have decidedly embraced the unprecedented power of machinic thinking, subsequently adopting its embedded logical processes. We may, however, pose a critical question in the context of this ‘second computational turn’ : Are there any non-computable elements of thought in the development of spatialised digital intelligence? As a partial response, this paper unpacks a series of productive relationships intersecting urban drawing and the passing of time in the context of a data-driven design environment. This enquiry looks into the processes carried out by a custom-built robotic drawing machine, tracing dynamic vector data streams collated from fieldwork developed via GPS tracking of individual urban displacements in Cagliari, Sardinia during April 2017. Its machinic drawing protocol re-enacts this continuous, heterogeneous, collectively constructed urban landscape as it slowly remaps its territorial occupation into the target surface of the paper.

The hybrid digital-analogue apparatus draws from a long historical lineage of vector-based machinic systems designed for architectural drafting. Situating themselves between the human hand and the surface of the paper, those machines acted as carriers of embodied spatial knowledge that could be selectively actualised into specific design processes and materialisations. Deploying a range of intertwined digital and analogue media, this machinic environment is used to articulate a data-based urban drawing research practice and a subsequent ‘anexact’ drawing research methodology that further elaborates on the durational and multiplicitous aspects of the data-based drawings. This body of work is also reflected on as a visual research methodology, which taps into Bernard Cache's interest in architectural computation as a way to pursue philosophical knowledge ‘by other means’ and into Gilbert Simondon's notion of the ‘technical ensemble’ – emphasising the productive forms of indetermination emerging from its internal informational transfers.

In this paper we establish a dialogue with Living with Buildings to contextualise NOTBAD (Niches for Organic Territories in Bio-Augmented Design), a multidisciplinary research project at the intersection of architecture and microbiology, sited within a wider historical discourse connecting architecture and health. Living with Buildings (2018) was organised by the Wellcome Trust to trace the changing landscape of health and architecture, setting out to show how connections between the ways we feel and the places in which we spend our lives have historically evolved as our ideas about health and disease have changed. Taking our cue from the pieces at the exhibition, we discuss how the eighteenth century saw the emergence of an imaginary of cleanliness linked to miasma theory, locating bad smells and odours as the origin of disease and resulting in the adoption of rituals of purification in buildings. Treatments of plastering, coating and whitewashing popularised in the nineteenth century are testament to a shift from olfactory to visual codes of hygiene and to the ‘antibiotic turn’ in architecture.

We extend the historical analysis to suggest that architecture finds itself at a crossroads. Although there is a growing understanding of how much architecture influences our wellbeing, architectural thought still clings to the antibiotic turn. Following the tradition of exchange between architecture and medicine, we propose the notion of Probiotic Architecture as a way of framing the shifting understanding of health in architectural design, suggesting that the microorganisms that colonise humans (the human microbiome) and our built environment (the built environment microbiome) have the potential to influence our health and the resilience of our buildings. Against the backdrop of the design research project Niches for Organic Territories in Bio-Augmented Design (NOTBAD), we suggest the need to reverse notions that all microbes are bad, to and propose instead materials and prototypes that encourage benign microbial growth.

Alison & Peter Smithson's Economist Building in London (1960–1964) has been much written about, but one of its most distinctive features – the Roach bed Portland stone cladding – has been relatively little discussed. Although there have been various retrospective explanations for the choice of this previously unused stone, whose surface is marked by cavities of now vanished shells, no direct evidence from the time fully accounts for the decision. Reliance upon inference, and upon retrospective statements, mean that no definitive explanation for the choice is now possible. Some new evidence from archives and interviews, and a re-examination of the contemporary concerns of the Smithsons, and of their artist friends Eduardo Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson, fellow members of the Independent Group during the 1950s, however, suggest a plausible, though speculative, interpretation. When considered in light of the Smithsons' and their friends' interests in pattern, in hidden orders, and in the problems of ‘human association’, the choice of Roach bed Portland stone seems less surprising. More than just ‘pretty’, as Peter Smithson was later to describe the material, it can be seen to connect with a fascination with underlying, non-human, systems of order, while at the same time providing a particularly expressive form of protection for human identity in the modern city.

This paper sets out the socio-spatial practices of PS2 and Street Society in territorialised, post conflict Northern Ireland – whose work combines pedagogical and improvisation theory to prototype distinctive social models. These practices were formed by a continual process of practical involvement and reflection (through writing) and evaluation (funding permitting), alongside the author-practitioners' search for theoretical concepts that would bring clarity and an alternative perspective to the processes and outcomes. Concepts and approaches taken from pedagogical theory and, uniquely in the case of architecture, improvisational theory, will be used to explore critical aspects of the specific practices, and more generally assert that such socio-spatial ‘street pedagogy’ offers a space of rehearsal and ultimately, a site for the development of socially-just aesthetics. The paper thus proposes a theoretical scaffolding for practices which increase diversity and diminish resource consumption in the contexts of climate emergency and a politics of precarity.