Design Exchange CHANGE edition

CURATOR’S NOTE

I gave a question to my first year Architecture students, predominantly aged 18-23, asking what worries them about the world today. Climate change and social inequality made up 95% of their concerns, less than 1% were interested in form of the designed object, and the other 4% pointed to the impacts of social media, wars and Brexit.

Yet all of them believed tackling those problems to be ideological and unrealistic. I found that more disturbing than the concerns themselves. We have created a social environment where issues of care are ideological, and those of economics real and concrete.

This absurd ‘reality’ needs to shift and foreground care where money is a means to make such projects and initiatives possible, rather than being the major driving force. This is not ideological. We are also being sold that competition is essential for productivity and is part of human nature, but competition in essence is a negative social relation.

Productivity does not have to be fuelled by competition but by big ambitions— currently those labelled as ‘unreal’ goals. Creativity does not have to be focused on the design of the consumer product but in the modes of practice that promote care. Once we prioritise equality and care over the product then I believe, as designers, we can innovate in services we create, methods of operation, and the structures of how we practice. Not just the products we make.

How much agency do we have as designers today? We are in an environment where civil society has lost trust in the experts. As Donald Schön described in his 1970s book, ‘The Reflective Practitioner’: if the experts don’t become critical and reflective in how they shape society and for whose primary benefit they produce, they will lose public trust.

My question today is: what would the design industry look like if we shift from the position of the ‘all-knowing’ expert to one that facilitates plurality of diverse knowings? What happens if authorship of aesthetic is plural and multiple? Do we become its curators? These are all thoughts I have spent 15 years practising, researching and teaching. It is from this position I can be confident that with creativity, collaboration and daring to imagine a different future anything is possible.

This issue of Design Exchange is about hope, and practices and individuals who have helped bring about change. The majority of the content showcases projects and people who have not compromised their concerns. They did not allow themselves to be steered by the values of their monocultural disciplines or imposed ideologies of the elite.

From artists and photographers to architects and designers, the latest chapter in this magazine’s evolving story highlights the importance of experimentation around disciplinary boundaries to create new forms of practice, bringing society, climate and social justice to the top of the agenda. We need to create work environments, learning and teaching opportunities that enable change makers to develop and sustain themselves, rather than retreat, in turn confining our resources to situations that are only financially beneficial to the few.

TORANGE KHONSARI | Guest Curator