We live in the time of wetness, a wetness that is everywhere before it is water somewhere. It aligns us to a design imagination that accommodates fluidity, openness, and complexity. But it also pushes us to expose the deep-rooted land centric imagination that has disciplined the world around us through infrastructure, science, and the humanities to subjugate water. It is a world that is unraveling before us. With rising seas, flooding cities, polluted rivers, piling wastes, widening inequalities, and escalating violence, we believe that ubiquitous wetness in place of the land-water binary holds the way forward. It is an exciting pre-disciplinary ground of design by which we re-articulate the past, experience the present, and envision the future.

Ocean of Wetness, is a transdisciplinary platform, a critical design practice, and a pedagogical initiative that asks if we have been so consumed by the vocabulary of land and water that (a) we miss or fail to understand peoples who devise other ways to inhabit ubiquitous wetness; (b) we deny the possibilities of a new imagination capable of solving today’s problems without perpetuating the ground that created them.