Design Culture Salon 3 – Design Activism: how does it change things?

Posted on 12/02/2013 by guyjulier

Tuesday 26 February 1900h-2030h
Hochhauser Auditorium, Sackler Centre, V&A

Panelists:
Jody Boehnert (EcoLabs)
Jonathan Chapman (University of Brighton)
Noel Douglas (Occupy Design)
Paul Micklethwaite (Kingston University)

Climate change, resource scarcity, economic crisis and struggles for social justice have given rise to new movements in design that seek more than creative and commercial fulfilment. What models of design practice support this? How might design work with other activist practices? What role do universities and museums have? How can design activism work with marginality?

Free, but booking is essential:: http://www.vam.ac.uk/whatson/event/1971/date/20130226/

The Panel

Jody Boehnert is an environmental communicator, designer, educator and activist who lives in Brixton. She is founding director of EcoLabs (http://eco-labs.org)
– a non-profit studio visualising complex environmental issues and recently completed an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded PhD titled: ‘The Visual Communication of Ecological Literacy: Design, Learning and Emergent Ecological Perception’ at the University of Brighton. Her research focuses on how images work to help audiences understand complex environmental issues in order to build capacity (and agency) to respond effectively. More recently, she worked with Noel Douglas establishing Occupy Design UK, a group that aims not only to use design skills so support activism, but to use the political and cultural critiques developed by social movements to transform design.

Jonathan Chapman  is Professor of Sustainable Design at the University of Brighton. His research, teaching and consultancy seek to reveal the behavioural phenomena that shape patterns of consumption and waste. Over the past decade, his teaching, consultancy and research have grown from their early polemical and activist roots, to developing strategic counterpoints to the unsustainable character of contemporary material culture. Described in New Scientist as a ‘mover and shaker’, Professor Chapman’s work has
critical acclaim by CNN International, New Statesman, New York Times, The Independent, New Scientist and numerous features on BBC Radio 4. He has written two books; his monograph, Emotionally Durable Design: Objects, Experiences & Empathy (Earthscan, 2005) and his co-edited work, Designers, Visionaries and Other Stories: A Collection of Sustainable Design Essays (Earthscan, 2007). His sustainable design consultancy experience includes The Science Museum (UK), the London Design Festival (UK), Clarks International, FitFlop and Puma.

Noel Douglas is an artist, designer and activist whose practice is concerned with the relationship between aesthetics and politics, anti-capitalist uses of signs and graphic communication and more general themes of the privatisation and the commodification of space and popular culture. He is currently Senior Lecturer and Course Leader for the Design for Communication degree programme at the University of Bedfordshire.  He co-curated Signs of Revolt and was key to the establishment of Occupy Design UK. See also http://www.noeldouglas.net/.

Paul Micklethwaite  is a Senior Research Fellow in The Design School in the Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture at Kingston University, UK, where he is course director of the MA Design for Development. His primary interests are in the impact of the sustainability agenda on the theory and practice of design, and emerging modes of design practice such as social innovation. He is co-author of the book Design for Sustainable Change: How design and designers can drive the sustainability agenda published by AVA Academia in 2011. Paul Micklethwaite is not a designer.

Guy Julier, chairing the Salon, is University of Brighton Principal Research Fellow in Contemporary Design at the V&A and Visiting Professor of Design Culture at the University of Southern Denmark.

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Reflections on Design Culture Salon 2 — Is ‘making stuff’ back on the agenda?

Posted on 30/01/2013 by guyjulier

With UK manufacturing have shrunk by two-thirds over the last 30 years, it seems almost anachronistic to be talking about resurgence of making. But the Tuesday 29 January Salon opened the concept up in a range of ways that underlined the the possibility that the politics of design works through heterogenuous forms as well.

Much of the discussion seemed to neatly follow on from Design Culture Salon 1, not least in this notion of a shift from centralized controls to open networks. Equally, in the recurrent issue of politically engaged approaches in design, it paved the way for February’s Salon on activism.

Glenn Adamson opened up the panel discussion by providing a subtle critique of the notions of ‘making’, ‘stuff’ and ‘agenda’ that were in the Salon’s theme. In particular, he asked, what kind of making are we talking about? He stated that there was an assumed permissiveness around making – that it was taken to be a good thing. As such, it could be something that was thrown at problems. Playing into a tradition that goes back to William Morris, John Ruskin or Thomas Carlyle, making could be uncritically understood to represent dignity in labour and craft might be revived as a social project. Equally, though, craft could be a tool of social repression as populations get divided between those who think and order, and those who make and follow. Thus, there may be an agenda to this revival of interest in making, he provocatively suggested. Beyond this, Glenn talked of the idea of ‘stuff’ as being primarily understood as non-commodities and, again, this needs challenging.

Speaking from her observations of parliamentary activities, Jocelyn Bailey opined that while MPs were eager to talk about a return to making as a way of re-balancing the UK economy, the evidence that there was a concerted and consistent approach to this in real policy terms was flimsy. There have been a couple of examples (Ed Vaizey and John Hayes) of politicians sounding quite enlightened about material culture and quality, and taking an interest in books like the Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes and  Matthew Crawford’s text Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work. However, government policy is currently so laden around purely economic and competitiveness concerns that there are contradictory things going on. In education terms, Design and Technology is fighting a rearguard action to remain on the schools’ curriculum. Meanwhile, there are few apprenticeships and specialist craft courses are closing. Further, it seems that the government is finding it difficult to talk legitimately about subjective things like ‘beauty’ and enshrine them in policy.

‘I want to talk about making as a right’, Daniel Charny stated. He aligned this with the recent rise of ‘making manifestos’ that added weight to the notion that making was intrinsically a political act. However, this shouldn’t be seen as a direct form of dissensus; rather, mass customization – making my stuff – was taking the detail of what it should be away from dominant productive systems. Later in the Salon, Daniel spoke powerfully of how ‘prosumers’ (Daniel didn’t use this term, but I’m borrowing it from Alvin Toffler’s 1981 book The Third Wave), were connected and connecting in novel ways by sharing ideas, techniques and tools. However, we shouldn’t necessarily be starry-eyed about this. The current interest in making may well signal either a requiem or a renaissance for it. In the UK, at least, the political, educational and economic cards are stacked up against it. On the other hand, there’s the force of human agency to consider.

Nick Gant sees himself as a material activist. His mission is to develop an idea as making as a way of constructing narratives. How you interact with materials, what you turn them into, the networks of others you engage in, the direction you take value in through objects all add up to an ideological process. Nick spoke passionately about the need to re-activate an enquiring approach to materiality. Of course, anyone who has read Bernard Leach’s writing may find a measure of similarity. However, arguably, Leach expressed his material politics in a semi-mystical way by talking of ‘returning to the clay’ as a return to the self. Nick’s drive is more progressive, I think. He is interested in making as a way of extending knowledge and understanding, of exploring the realms of the possible.

We run the risk of sounding like a group of effete southerners, here in the V&A, with all our clever-clever ideas about ethics, politics and craft. Someone had tweeted Daniel Charny during the day, having heard about the Salon, to drily suggest that at last, making must have finally reached London. So it was, as ever, refreshing to hear from Katie Hill who has years of experience in making in community settings in the North of England. It is a primary means of communication and a deep way of finding out, she suggested. However, Katie was quick to disavow us of it being any la-di-dah activity. Making comes of necessity and she drew attention to several examples where making was back on the agenda because – due to  local authority budget cuts or, indeed, poverty – it was necessary for survival and resilience.

Salon2.3

With a sigh (it was probably an intensely boring question) I asked the panellists where all this fitted with any creative industries policy agenda that might be still lying around. It seemed to me that the broader notion of creative industries and more specifically, the rise of ‘design thinking’ had become rather blunt and abstracted. Objects, expressivity and affect seem to have dropped out of the discussion. I was roundly told that the creative industries notion had run its course. Basically a New Labour invention, it was really used for economic planning and analysis. It had also worked as a ‘soft power’ tool – a way of selling Britain.

The nuance of our discussion seemed beyond this, though. Perhaps an outfall of all the rhetoric around design and innovation was a kind of ‘Dragon’s Den’ notion where entrepreneurs were taking a punt with suspect products and ideas, Daniel suggested.

Audience questions and statements were keenly aware of the fickleness of our times. It seems that we are poised within sets of tensions, one of which is between resilience (cf. localism, Transition Towns) and contigency. At the moment, reflecting on the words of our panellists and other participants, this ‘making’ thing is little insitutionalized (except with the possible exception on the V&A, at least in terms of its representation). Indeed, the educational movements or policy agenda seem to be pointing in a myriad of (sometimes conflicting) directions.

Making as a practice and an ideological position, in its pragmaticism and applied character, can exploit the fissures that are left behind. But this has a Janus-like quality. A renaissance of making requires an outward looking, connected mindset but also a focus on problems and solutions that are close to hand.

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Design Culture Salon 2 – Is ‘making stuff’ back on the agenda?

Posted on 06/12/2012 by guyjulier

Next Salon

Tuesday 29 January, 1900h-2030h

Is ‘making stuff’ back on the agenda?
Panelists:
Glenn Adamson (V&A)
Jocelyn Bailey (Policy Connect)
Daniel Charny (From Now On)
Nick Gant (Inheritable Futures Laboratory/University of Brighton)
Katie Hill (Sheffield Hallam University)

After decades of talk of ‘deindustrialization’ and the rise of service industries, it seems that manufacture and making are back in fashion. Politicians, TV producers and curators want to talk about stuff again. Why might this be so? Is there really a renaissance of materiality? How is this influencing design practice and the dynamics of consumption?

Free, but booking is essential:: http://www.vam.ac.uk/whatson/event/1971/date/20130129/

Glenn Adamson is Head of Research at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Dr. Adamson is co-editor of the triannual Journal of ModernCraft, and the author of Thinking Through Craft (Berg Publishers/V&APublications), an anthology entitled The Craft Reader (Berg, 2010), and the forthcoming book The Invention of Craft (Bloomsbury/V&A, 2013).  His other publications include the co-edited volumes Global Design History (Routledge, 2011) and Surface Tensions (Manchester). He was the co-curator for the exhibition ‘Postmodernism: Style and Subversion, 1970 to 1990’, which was on view at the V&A from September 2011 to January 2012.

Jocelyn Bailey is Head of Manufacturing, Design & Innovation at Policy Connect, an organisation that works with parliamentarians, business and the public sector to help improve policy. Within Policy Connect she is Manager of the Associate Parliamentary Design & Innovation Group. Over the last two years she has overseen Policy Connect’s expansion into a programme of work around manufacturing, including the Parliamentary campaign, ‘Made By Britain’. She has also worked at Blueprint magazine and Nissen Adams architects.

Daniel Charny is an independent curator and co-founder director at From Now On, a creative projects consultancy. He has recently joined as Professor of Design at KingstonUniversity in the Faculty of Art Design & Architecture. Between 2002 – 2010 he was the founding curator of The Aram Gallery for experimental and new design. His most recent curating project was ‘Power of Making’ at the Victoria and AlbertMuseum, seen by over 320,000 visitors it has become the V&A’s most popular free exhibition ever staged. As Senior Tutor at the Royal College of Art, where he taught for 14 years,  he was a key member of the team that merged Industrial Design and Furniture Design into the Design Products department. His current projects include founding Fixperts.org encouraging fixing as a way of thinking and promoting creative social values through design.

Nick Gant is a designer, researcher and educator and has led programmes in design and craft as well as high-value, practice based research projects with international industrial partners. As a maker by training, his collaborative research and practice explores material and object meanings and languages, ethics and sustainability and locality and community. His exhibition ‘On Our Doorsteps – Local Design Activism’ at 100% Design 2012 curated makers who explore ‘local’ as a creative methodology and context. The ‘Sole Searching’ project is part of an ongoing collaboration with Tanya Dean includes the fabrication of highly crafted shoes made from waste materials which map a culture of makers and help establish methodologies for ‘meaningful material interactions’. Nick is also researching the interpretation and valuation of virtual, made objects through digital media.

Katie Hill is a design researcher who works across academia and the third sector using creativity and design to engage communities in social and environmental projects. She is currently working on several Arts and Humanities Research Council ‘Connected Communities’ projects some of which use making as tool for community engagement and learning. In the late stages of a PhD at the University of Brighton, her thesis is on developing design practice as an enabling process to support agency and empower people to make positive social and environmental change within their neighbourhoods, and she is interested in various aspects of making in terms of DIY culture and the use of craft within activism and as a social connector.

Guy Julier, chairing the Salon, is Professor of Design Culture and the University of Brighton Principal Research Fellow in Contemporary Design in the Research Department of the V&A.

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Reflections on Design Culture Salon 1 — ‘What Can Museums Do With Contemporary Design?’

Posted on 28/11/2012 by guyjulier

The two big V&A events of the evening on Tuesday 27 November were the grand opening of the new furniture galleries and the equally grand start to the 2012-13 Design Culture Salon season. Asymmetrically placed, the main entrance welcomed loyal museum friends with a flourish, while participants in this Salon snuck in through the Exhibition Road tunnel. The front end of the museum was concerned with its, let’s say, more permanent role of galleries and collections, while we, in the Sackler Centre at the back of the museum were discussing change, dynamics, energy, fluidity, the immaterial and delirium.

In chairing this event, I hadn’t intended to set up an opposition between the historical in the design museum being about dead space, stopped energy and the static encased object and the contemporary being a porous environment with fuzzy edges where the exhibition becomes an event and a performance. But certainly in terms of contemporary design the latter ideas coursed through much of the evening’s discussion.

Louise Shannon spoke of the challenge of curating digital design in terms of how to capture, exhibit and preserve it on the one hand while maintaining a fluid relationship with its on-going and iterative production on the other. Where does the unfinished object of software – which may be subject to continual updating – or a digital representation of changing data begin and end?

Jane Pavitt told us of how she saw that there can never be a ‘one size fits all’ approach to curating contemporary design. Furthermore, public access to an exhibition is through various routes, not just by getting a ticket and wandering around it. There is a halo of information and discussion through other media that is encountered. Some of this is generated from the event itself. Much of it is in response. Thus, while curating may be about defining and posing a set of key questions, there comes a point where you let go and the event takes on its own life beyond the museum.

Stephen Feber spoke of the exhibition as a neurological event where its information works at different levels of consciousness. It gets layered up as a cognitive process in the way it engages the senses. But it can also reflexively address the different ways by which meaning is generated and circulated. Thus another kind of layering happens where the object is subjected to multiple treatments and viewpoints in the same space.

Liz Farrelly reflected on the museum as providing a locus beyond the exhibition. She spoke of her pleasure, if not delirium, in attending lectures, seminars and workshops at museums. Here the museum becomes a centre for live discussion where the dynamic and ephemeral characteristics of contemporary design are momentarily captured.

Jan Boelen continued somewhat in this vein, explaining how his gallery approach was about taking current social themes and materializing research through a conjunction of exhibition, talks, publications and performances. These are resolutely discipline agnostic in that art, design, popular culture or whatever else works are mustered into these spaces. Traditional museum approaches tend to keep things under wraps until the exhibition opening, accompanying book, press releases and symposium are blasted out in a tightly organized display of curatorial power. An alternative way is to consider an iterative, open and on-going project where not all the outcomes are pre-defined.

The argument that the museum, in dealing with contemporary design, can be about the open-ended, dynamic flow of ideas, and, indeed, objects is seductive. It resonates with contemporary notions of our so-called network society.

This could also suggest speed and that the museum gets caught up in a breathless spectacle of the contemporary. (At this point, somewhere in the back of my mind at this point the Independent Group’s 1956 Whitechapel exhibition ‘This Is Tomorrow’.) And conversely, ‘slow’ is seen as ‘bad’ and anti-contemporary. We were quick to dispel this, however. Slowing down, contemplation and even the quietness of a spiritual moment are just as important with contemporary design.

Discussion moved through many themes. Two important and related ones were those of process and collecting. The V&A’s Thomas Heatherwick exhibition was thick with descriptions of process through drawings, models and rigs. We were fortunate to have its curator Thomas Abraham in the audience who eloquently expanded on his role in collecting and documenting design development. This disabuses us of the assumption that the design is in the ‘finished’ object. Further, process is not just in visual or material preparatory work, but exists in a whole range of verbal and non-verbal interactions such as studio discussions or client presentations. At the same time, drawings and models themselves become collectable, so there is a resulting danger that some architects and designers actually control the outcomes of process or process itself in the anticipation of them being exhibited in a design museum one day!

We can extend this idea of documentation into the realm of reception and consumption. This is where, then, the museum moves beyond collecting objects to documenting a range of moments. As the object of contemporary design so frequently involves a constellation of artefacts, both material and immaterial (think Barclays Bike that brings together the hardware of the bikes and stations with the digital systems of procurement and backup management), so somehow documenting these and their use rather than capturing their entirety is the only option. To push further, perhaps we could be thinking in terms of a whole circuit of culture conception as a model for contemporary design in the museum, where production, consumption, regulation, representation and identity (to employ sociologist Paul du Gay’s formulation) come into view?

This takes us on to the possibilities of open source for curation. We might not just be thinking of the museum being ‘consumed’, but also of documenting public response and engagement. I’m not talking about footfall numbers or the comments book. Rather, as Stephen argued, we are on the cusp of involving audiences in constructing or filling out the museum by providing additional information, reflections or responses that add to the event. Here the museum itself becomes the audience to the results.

Guy Julier, 28 November 2012

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Design Culture Salon 1

Posted on 10/10/2012 by guyjulier

Tuesday 27 November, 1900-2030.
What can museums do with contemporary design?
Panelists: 
Jan Boelen (Kunstcentrum Z33)
Liz Farrelly (University of Brighton)
Stephen Feber (social enterprise developer)
Jane Pavitt (Royal College of Art)
Louise Shannon (V&A)

Contemporary design culture is finding increased, dedicated space in museums. But as immaterial practices and outcomes take up more prominence in design, how do these museums respond? How do we exhibit and collect digital artefacts, systems, services or, even, design thinking? And what roles should the design museum undertake initially?

Venue:  Seminar Room One, Sackler Centre, Victoria & Albert Museum, South Kensington

Free, but booking is essential:  http://www.vam.ac.uk/whatson/event/1971/date/20121127/

For more detailed information on this particular event and invited speakers see Further Information.


The Design Culture Salon series features occasional discussion events at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. It provides a space to discuss specific issues of contemporary design in society and develop new ideas.

Each event features an invited panel, chaired by Guy Julier, University of Brighton Professor of Design Culture at the V&A. Panelists provide brief, personal overviews of the respective event’s theme. This is followed by open discussion.

These salons are supported by the University of Brighton and the Learning Department and Research Department of the V&A.

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