In order to investigate the threshold as an abstract phenomenon and to enhance a purposeful exploration within, we felt the urge to conceptualise and frame it. A threshold is something inconcrete, something vague, standing in contrast to everything else that is defined and concrete. In our everyday reality we can observe a tendency of favouring the concrete. Things mostly need to be explainable and efficient. They have to make sense. Those things we do not understand and which we struggle to put into words are often hard to integrate into economic contexts.
Nevertheless, there is a vast and on-going dynamic between the vague and the concrete. We would like to investigate and better understand this dynamic and give space to the inconcrete.
This led us to the conception of the Vague Space. (...)
The difficulty at this point is to describe something that vanishes as soon as you attempt to put it into images and words. Nevertheless, this is exactly what we set out to do (bearing in mind the limitation of our endeavour). (...)
During the process of writing and discussing this text, we became aware of the potential this conception may have not only for design theory but also for other fields. We believe it may help to connect the concrete realities of economic competition, innovation pressure or the routines of paper and application writing with an intuitive and creative practice, leading to a certain freedom and confidence to think off the beaten tracks. (...)
In this sense, our intention of the Vage Space is an encouragement to stay consciously and maybe slightly longer inside the vague, to extend our space of possibilities and to add these possibilities to our current reality. Thus, we believe it is possible to become familiar with the unknown, train one’s intuition and to accept uncertainty, in order to face vagueness with curiosity and to enjoy its exploration.