What is a discipline that remains housed in an enclosure?

The pioneers of our time are not taking the world at face value, as a given from the outside; rather, they see the world as something you can pry open, something you can tinker with.

Marleen Stikker

We invite a focused composition of contributors from divergent domains of practice – those who question the provenance of knowledge as well as it’s production, dissemination and digestion – add to this ingestion as we move forwards. These may be practitioners, thinkers, tinkerers, hackers (et al) who traverse disciplinary boundaries and open their practice to other fields.

We are interested in exploring a sharing and collaborative economy as a direct challenge to the capitalist imagination.

We are curious about participatory practices that break down the boundaries between specialists and amateurs.

We seek to discuss the things we don’t yet understand (and perhaps never will).

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.

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.