ABOUT UNIDENTIFIED FACILITY
UFƟ (Unidentified Facility Onsite) is a Design Collaboratory, a collaborative laboratory exploring future ecologies and emerging cosmologies through design drifting, fieldwork, workshops, and experimental research. At its core, UFƟ is more than a platform for research, it is a research practice itself. It is a flexible, temporal process that evolves over time, creating collisions, activations, and letting research unfold through encounter rather than prescription. By using the metaphor of the UFƟ (Ɵ as a metaphor for our onsite nature), we expand our approach to research through storytelling, audio, writing, drifting, interventions, and investigation, each exploring new ways of knowing and learning.
UFƟ connects a broad global network of practitioners and educators, creating collaborative spaces where the exchange of knowledge and lived experience drives the reimagining of ecosystems, creative practices, and experimental methodologies. Operating as a network of networks, UFƟ continuously links, supports, and energises experimental and nonlinear thinkers around the world.
UFƟ functions as a drift itself, constantly moving with time, shifting conditions, and the changing phenomena of the world. Our work evolves through motion: slowing down, speeding up, and redirecting as new questions, communities, and environments emerge. This drifting approach allows us to stay open, adaptive, and responsive, creating moments of activation, encounter, and exchange. Since 2017 this way of working has shaped how we immerse ourselves in places and situations, and how we re-emerge with new perspectives.
UFƟ is a practice for translating and mediating plural viewpoints and experiences from all stakeholders, enabling holistic perspectives that de-centre the self in order to learn from and encompass all viewpoints (human, non-human, and phenomena). As we learn how to take things into account, we also learn to cultivate diversity within the plural communities that we embody.
_
UFƟ Design Collaboratory is based on 4 indicators that inform the work we do.
COSMOLOGY (understanding of self, other, place, TIME)
Collective (a shared equal NETWORK)
ECOSYSTEMS (holistic inclusive processes)
Not-Knowing ( as fundament for discovery AND DECENTRING)
_
At a time when the future of life on this planet is more uncertain than ever, the urgency of exploring alternative ways of learning, relating, and knowing is pivotal. Our ecosystems, communities, and practices are not static; they are continuously evolving as living networks, moving through ecotones and cosmologies. Humans have made both sudden and long-term impacts on the planet, affecting the potential for healthy, holistic ecologies and often limiting or suppressing the possibility of symbiotic relationships with the world we inhabit. We exist within the context of nature, exploring both the nature of things and our relationship with the things of nature.
Navigating future ecosystems requires new approaches that foster situated, embedded practice, empathetic engagement, and non-reductionist thinking. As a practice, we operate in a constant state of the unknown and the in-between spaces that are instrumental for processing, learning, exchanging, and enabling new, diverse, and liminal practices.
To stimulate curiosity toward new dimensional thinking and practice, UFƟ aims to de-materialise existing design and research territories, navigating new ways to expand ideation and broaden viewpoints. In doing so, it generates new narratives, scenarios, and holistic responses.
UFƟ stands for more experimentation and collaboration, greater openness to engaging with non-human and unknown phenomena, alternative ways of interweaving knowledge and imagination, increased attention to place-based and immersive research, and more connected networks of knowledge across species and environments.