Critical creative engagement is of increasing importance in a world that has apparently manoevered itself into a state of permanent crisis. Unprecedented ecological, technological, economic, and social transformations require the re-evaluation of both concepts and categories from a viewpoint of architecture and design. Complexities of the relations between modernisation and tradition, local, regional and global, the rural and the urban are in urgent need of research that takes into account all of the perspectives the world has to offer and their related technologies, histories, philosophies, and theories.