Re-directive Practice

Key elements of re-directive practice

Re-directive Practice is aimed at having impacts at the cultural level: the way people think and their perspective on things. It is concerned with discovering, looking at, questioning and changing basic assumptions. This is particularly aimed at expanding the limited application of design, especially in architecture.

Jim Gall has successfully applied this to projects and competition entries (working with Team DES, Queensland College of Art and others) and continue to develop proposals -see Projects.

Some basic design moves:

  • DESIGN from the future to the present
  • DESIGN as a means of care system
  • DESIGN the symbolic power of Sustainment
  • DESIGN the move from the quantitative to the qualitative economy
  • DESIGN for elimination of the unsustainable
  • DESIGN climatic defensive architecture
  • DESIGN to conserve natural and fabricated resources
  • DESIGN to deploy old and new sustainable practices and technologies
  • DESIGN adaptive social, cultural and community structures and processes
  • DESIGN organisational and politcal models appropriate to a culture of sustainment

Boonah Two: Factors in Futuring a City by Redirective Practice

  • Futuring and redirective practice - a path to a sustainable world
  • Constructing a sustainable city - equals building a material fabric, operational system, economy and social ecology
  • Providing power renewably - an act of futuring
  • Feeding and watering the city - part of its metabolic existence
  • Social participation in sustainment - a bringer of life to the common good
  • The social relations of care - something of the world to do and feel
  • The generation of attraction - desirability is also a sustaining power
  • Protection over time and space: an imperative of creation
  • Generative knowledge - gathering ideas and knowledge is powerful

Above all, designing within a metabolic model - which means understanding that catchment-based settlement is directly connected to its region's ecological carrying capacity, natural resources and goods, services and human capital. This includes a capability for adaptive self reproduction, an ability for the city to feed, water itself and manage all its forms of waste, maintain the health and wellbeing of its population and grow other cities from the same ecological stock.