DOSSIER

ISSUE DESCRIPTION: Starting from the possibilities of transferring into the Architecture the so-called KETs (Key-Enabling Technologies), both tangible and intangible, the issue 25 of TECHNE addressed the question of the enabling roles of Technology in the different areas of design. KETs have already extensively entered in the field of Architecture and the governance of city and territory, but they were often pandered to the logics of technocratic production and in an uncritical manner. In its function as a medium, however, Technology can enable new ideational, adaptive, implementing, and managing processes applied to the transformation of the built environment at different scales. This is to overcome a purely instrumental and distorted dimension of KETs that risk overriding the very purpose of the project, opening the way to exclusively algorithmic and parametric technicalities. These drifts tend to generate reductionist readings, automated and merely quantitative standardizations of design goals and outcomes, failing instead to recognize its inherent complexity and the purposeful and critical design thinking that must underlie it. The contributions received for this issue confirm, instead, that Technology is capable of playing an enabling role 'upstream, throughout and downstream' in the process of design and construction research and experimentation, according to an open, heuristic, innovative, inter and pluridisciplinary vision, proper to architectural design. The key themes proposed to prompt the development of the different contributions concern: 'Technology to foresight and support decisions'; 'Technology to generate quality habitats'; 'Technology for the proper use of resources’. DOSSIER DESCRIPTION: The definition of enabling technologies highlights a still partially unsolved question. The so-called KETs are identified and remodulated according to the variability of financial markets and leading industrial production sectors. It is not surprising that the debate and experimentation on them has affected the field of Architecture with a preference for the digitization aspects. In the disciplines of Architecture, however, it is important to focus on the technology that not only anticipates or solves problems thanks to the digital processes and devices, but it also contributes to enabling multiple states of co-evolutionary adaptivity between bios and techne. On these questions, the issue of the enabling role of technology has been brought to the attention of some researchers who deal with the multiple challenges posed by technological innovations with respect to the complexities of doing Architecture. The contributions of Nicola Emery, Maurizio Ferraris, and Paolo Tombesi highlighted that the problem is not to classify, reorientate, deny, or exalt techniques as more or less enabling resources. A much more complex scenario emerges concerning the theoretical, anthropological, and methodological aspects of designing. The real challenge is to regain possession of the technological skills to connect or recompose different technical levels in an enabling, plural, and multidimensional organic vision, to guarantee, consolidate and improve our behavioral and housing attitudes.