The Value of Unresolved Design

Emergence is an intriguing design process.

Allowing a structure to stand without interference is to accept an artificial world shaped by use. To clarify, it is not about what can stand and what should fall. Emergent design does not predict, it should not restrict, and could never explicitly instruct; instead, it is an observer of human capability coexisting with environmental uncertainty.

This is ‘Makeshift’ design.

It is a Japanese architectural practice exploring the structure as a state of transition. Makeshift design is permeable, utilised to enhance the lives of people who dwell within. But if you remove hierarchy in design, you also remove constraint. How can seemingly ‘unfinished’ design practices create purpose without outwardly defined objectives?

Do not underestimate the strength of an invisible force. Emergence is not passive; no intentional structure is. An object’s silent mechanics invite use, and its neutral cadence allows reconfiguration. What differentiates emergence from poorly executed design is a considered balance of fixed and unfixed boundaries.

What does this have to do with packaging? You could define packaging as pure constraint: tamper-proofing, sealing, closures, and set sizes are what keep products safe. But what if these constraints were built from observation? Neutrality creates opportunities, and design makes choices. The design choice for packaging to control or adapt has evolved from an original structure that can be challenged and changed.

Can understanding makeshift practices in architecture allow us to recontextualise box packaging as an emergent design? To answer this, we first need to understand what makeshift design is.

Redefining Authorship

To describe Makeshift design as simply as possible, it is an observation of ‘who’, not what.

Prioritising emergence over control shifts emphasis from the designer’s authority to the user’s intuition. Ultimately, the value of unresolved design lies in its stance that architecture is not finished at handover, but continually authored through life.

It is clear that we respond well to an environment that changes with us. Traces of humanity are evident in how we utilise our surroundings. An interesting example of human traces in everyday environments is Desire Lines. These are informal paths formed through repeated pedestrian use and represent perhaps the most direct manifestation of unresolved design. These traces reveal discrepancies between planned routes and embodied preference.

When designers delay formalisation until desire lines appear, they engage in reactive authorship. Rather than imposing movement patterns, they allow collective motor behaviour to define spatial logic. This phenomenon underscores the argument that unresolved environments are not incomplete; they are temporally extended, allowing knowledge to surface through use.

If architectural decisions benefit from observing this knowledge from unresolved design, maybe it is not just about who, but also when.

Resolution in Modern Environments

When a space is overly specified, it becomes brittle.

These spaces are unable to accommodate unforeseen behaviours, cultural shifts, or embodied variation. By contrast, unresolved design introduces elasticity, enabling environments to evolve through occupation. If we were to define these architectural systems by predetermined design and environmental adaptability as different, it shows a contrast in behaviour. But in the spirit of makeshift design, let’s deconstruct this imposed boundary. Without knowing the design intention, can we see the difference between the two?

The significance of fully realised design systems and structures is evident in our complex engineering achievements across the world and throughout time. Although reliable, these structures are built for a specific purpose and are not intended to last forever. Eventually, machinery is retired, and manufacturing plants are decommissioned. It is understood that the tools we make serve the present, and what we learn from this use folds into our future technology.

Unresolved design respects the limits of foresight; however, building for reliability in the present does not change design evolution.

You could consider modern environments to be predetermined; a cultural climate contained within circulation routes, seating, thresholds, and interfaces. Resolved spaces prioritise clarity, but let’s reframe this notion. Resolved spaces exist in the past, but in the present, a state of resolution exists. What makes a space determined is a previous existence. Assume man-made objects will not last forever, and you accept that modern environments are in a state of transition. What emerges from this is a natural resolution.

When we not only notice this environmental resolution, but also make an intentional effort to create an environment capable of conscious change, this is makeshift design. These ideas find their clearest articulation in contemporary Japanese architecture.

The Architecture of the Forest: Sou Fujimoto

Sou Fujimoto’s distinction between architecture as a cave and as a forest provides a useful theoretical framework. The cave represents a space defined by enclosure and singular purpose, while the forest is a complex, unresolved space that offers a multitude of possibilities.

In his design for the Musashino Art University Museum & Library, the walls are essentially giant, empty bookshelves. The purpose of the space is not “resolved” until the books are placed and the students begin to inhabit the nooks. It is a design derived from exposure; the library structure is constantly being rewritten by the people using it. Like a forest, the building doesn’t tell you where to go; it invites you to find your own path through the stacks.

Here, architecture functions less as an object and more as a condition, and its form is contingent on exposure to use.

The Forest Model for Corrugated Packaging

Sou Fujimoto’s ‘Forest’ finds its packaging equivalent in the unresolved interior.

In traditional packaging, an optimised box should leave no room for movement and void fill is seen as a failure of fit. However, applying the Forest Model reframes the box as a fertile void.

When we use flexible corrugated sheets, scored blockers, or modular fillers, we are not just protecting a product; we are providing the ‘empty bookshelves’ of Fujimoto’s library. The user (or the packer) must navigate this internal forest, folding, wedging, and tearing the material to meet the specific topography of the object inside. The resolution of the package occurs only at the moment of encounter.

In this model, the corrugated material is a spatial condition rather than a fixed container. It invites the handler to find their own path through the fluting, turning a generic volume into a bespoke, authored territory.

The Porous City: Ryue Nishizawa and the Engawa

Ryue Nishizawa’s work further develops unresolved design through spatial porosity. Central to this is the engawa, a traditional Japanese threshold space that resists being definitively categorised as interior or exterior.

In the Moriyama House, domestic functions are distributed across detached volumes separated by open air. The absence of internal corridors forces occupants to negotiate space through environmental conditions, such as light, weather, and seasonal change. Movement becomes situational rather than scripted.

The spaces between buildings are deliberately undefined. Their function emerges through daily practices, transforming residual space into active social and environmental interfaces. This approach destabilises conventional boundaries between architecture, landscape, and urban life.

Nishizawa’s Engawa in Corrugated Packaging

Nishizawa’s engawa—the porous boundary—recontextualises the corrugated box as a negotiable threshold. Most packaging is designed with a “binary” state: it is either sealed or destroyed. Nishizawa’s ethos suggests a third state: the “active remodel.”

Corrugated packaging that utilises perforated grids, secondary score lines, or “telescoping” geometries functions as a porous system. It destabilises the convention that a box has a fixed volume. Instead, the user can cut, sleeve, and refold the material to “shrink-wrap” a diminishing content or to expand to accommodate new additions.

This is the packaging equivalent of the Moriyama House: the “walls” of the box are not permanent. They are situational. By allowing the box to be resized or segmented without losing structural integrity, we move away from the “scripted” box and toward a system that breathes with its contents. The “residual space” within the box becomes an active interface for the user’s own spatial logic.

Meaningful Responses From Corrugated Architecture

In the context of makeshift design, corrugated board becomes an interesting material to work with.

To view a box as “corrugated architecture” is to accept that its most valuable state is one of calculated decay and adaptation. Architecture is often judged by its ability to resist the elements, but corrugated material thrives on exposure.

Because corrugated board is a composite of liners and fluting, it possesses a unique memory. When a box is handled, it begins to accumulate a haptic history. Unlike plastic, which either holds its shape or snaps, corrugated material negotiates. A dent is not a flaw; it is a structural record of an impact. A bulge is the material’s way of communicating internal pressure.

In an unresolved architectural system, these deformations are haptic annotations.

The Softened Corner: Where repeated lifting has broken down the fibres, creating a natural, ergonomic grip that no designer could have pre-moulded.
The Stabilised Fold: Where the weight of the contents has forced the fibres to set into a new geometry, effectively ‘curing’ the box into its most stable form through use.

This is where the box becomes a Learning System. The architecture of the box is not imposed from the top down; it is worn into the material by the friction of reality. The makeshift nature of the corrugated box allows it to be both constructive (building a shelter for the product) and destructive (yielding to the hand) simultaneously.

Conclusion

This essay does not seek completion.

By misaligning these two disciplines, you have been left to navigate a structure without an obvious end-use solution. It may not have been easy to read, but in doing so, you have authored your own resolution. Parallels emerge most clearly when we allow enough space for them to form.

Before you leave this space, consider this question: Would you choose an object that is broken yet adaptable, or one that is fixed and unusable?

Ontopack