Resilience Envelopes: The “Fourth Environment” as a Source of Inspiration, a Place for Speculation and a Territory for Experimenting with New Models of Life

The paper aims to investigate the relationship between Design and Space, understood as a territory of innovation that has always influenced design culture’s expressive and imaginative potential. In particular, it is highlighted how this relationship still conditions the way we relate, as humans and as designers, to the concepts of nature and technological innovation. Beginning with a critical reasoning on the millennial human-technology-nature relationship, the paper will investigate how spatial research, has inspired both theoretical-philosophical models, expressive languages and technological transfers that have influenced design at multiple levels, from morphological to material and conceptual. Subsequently, the paper will focus on design research applied to Space, understood as a place of speculation where design finds opportunities to develop critical and future-oriented projects in a context of experimentation at high rates of innovation. Finally, the paper will demonstrate, how the evolution of the relationship between design and spatial research, which has now become biunivocal, contributes to the maturity of the human-nature-technology debate. Indeed, Space becomes a territory for experimentation of new models, aimed at recreating eco-symbiotic design visions for the nurturing and development of life, applicable to such contexts as well as to the future of our Planet.