Working on Transformation is the result of encounter. Staged between faculty, students and collaborators at the Chair of Architecture and Urban Transformation at ETH Zurich (otherwise known as NEWROPE), these encounters are performances of world-building, inviting participants and audiences to imagine new ways to choreograph alliance. Recognising the present need for new forms of critical design education underscores the project's immediacy. By documenting the production of NEWROPE’s teaching experiments, the book becomes a guiding companion, anticipating future experiments to be staged outside of this forum. Imagined in this way, it is not an instruction for collaboration but a component part of these very relations. Portability catalyses functionality: designed to be held close, carried around and frequently referenced as a habitual working companion. Inside, the narrative is distilled across four chapters, each organised around a verb: ‘to project’, ‘to experience’, ‘to sequence’, and ‘to activate’. These verbs arise twice within each chapter: first as a contextual survey of established disciplinary practices within the field of architecture and urban transformation (as the Action); and second as a speculative invitation to re-enact these practices in nascent forms (as the Primer). These latter sections offer rumination on NEWROPE’s ongoing pursuit of collectivity as a methodology to address the urgent complexities of our times. Tested within NEWROPE’s Design in Dialogue Lab this investigation uses tangible elements such as props and performative mock-ups as instruments to affect new forms of communication and engagement. Understanding the book as not only a narration of these collaborative rehearsals but a companion to future performances, we come to realise its self-fulfilling function—a prop for tacit co-creation.
