ABSTRACT
Designing through a field-based approach like this allows the designer to "feel" the dimensionality of their work through tangibly occupying the livingness of their design as they immerse themselves in its materiality and context. Testing their designs in this way, students experience the veracity of gravity firsthand, they find relationship with the elemental—earth, air, fire, water—and they find the fullness of poiesis only imagined otherwise through two-dimensional computer screens and scaled models. Through the elemental, geo-centricity affords design students a different way to see their relationship to their world, a way to become better citizens of the earth—better earthlings. hrough an enlivened theory-based discourse that approaches poetics by growing out of geo-centricity, Gulf Coast DesignLab students might begin to see their role on the earth reframed through reflection. As poetic designers and makers, this sort of reflection becomes vital if they are to become better equipped at finding relationship with all that is.
