While exploring new modes of design, we will re-envision the ‘architect’, as a multi-disciplinary agent for critical change: newly traversing varied contestations in the landscape. The design agent will examine and map existing systems and their autonomous conditions with a view to creating synergies. In contested landscapes, we will be challenged to determine how design intervention as ecological prosthetic can be embedded at a moment of confluence. Mitigation and adaptation deployed through design intervention could therefore adjust potential tipping points. Conflicting environmental and economic agendas have opened up a window of opportunity to re-establish the biospheric agenda as the crucial foundation upon which future expansion will most successfully proceed. On this point, the thesis will be similarly founded on the goal of interrogating global drivers by directly engaging the most valuable resources in landscapes: cultural and biological diversity.

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