This series of Something or Other examines the notion of design for structural change in society, how practitioners across a range of subject areas are using their skills and knowledge to push for more ambitious and sustained effects through their action, in the way they work, the way they organise or they topics they research.

The economies and ecologies of scale that we find ourselves in have significant implications for the ways in which we practice. We’ve come to learn that our interventions, however large or small, can and will have effects on the social realities we inhabit and shape (through design). Through all this we find interlocking systems of scale, from large globe-straddling networks to vibrant hermit economies seeking resilience for an uncertain future.

This series of Something or Other examines notions of the micro and the macro through an interdisciplinary, process and method-driven lens. The speakers will broadly address how their practices, methods and research encounter and work (or don’t work) across these scales. This theme follows on from our previous series ‘Practicing Platforms’ – exploring how platformed networks and economies are changing and changed by creative practice and the 15/16 theme of ‘Uncertainty.’

What does it mean to design into existing or for emerging platforms?

The practices of design have been understood to shift inline with or in response to social conditions, technological advances and economic developments. In light of considerable and continuing change, we are now at a point where the definition, design and positioning of practices are becoming pieces of design in and of themselves – calling for new terms (definitions of practice), procedures (models of working/being) and platforms (sites of action). This current moment presents exciting, though challenging, concerns for the next generation of designers.

How can we design practices that are democratic, representative and progressive unbound by bias, discrimination or assumption? What are the procedures in practice that demonstrate a sensitivity to the social and political implications of design? How do we learn new techniques to discern, authenticate or imagine alternatives to hegemonic platforms?

We invite this year’s guests to bring forward propositions that form a dialogue between past concerns and those yet to be encountered.

Uncertainty and precariousness are characteristics of our (post-digital) times. The dominant political ideology of neoliberalism has intrinsically linked individualism and personal productivity to economic survival, made possible through complex, ubiquitous and pervasive computational networks and systems.

Technologies demand constant connectivity and perpetual consumption and contribute, according to Mark Fisher, to the current attack on the subject, come consumers of services (educational, political, economical etc).

The next generation of designers will enter this uncertainty and it is not a comfortable place to be: it raises existential questions about living in this complex and fragmented world, as well as requiring designers to consider their responsibilities in designing (for/through/with) uncertainties: political, economic, educational, environmental.