Students attending the project briefing presentation
PREFACE
Physical prototypes used to present ideas for feedback
2020 will always be remembered as the year that Covid-19 came to Glasgow and the GSA, as the phenomenon that interrupted study and paused the ambitions of the Product Design students, and called a halt to their collaboration with the Sustainable Futures in Africa Network, and the University of Glasgow. However, despite this hiatus, learning continued. The enforced pause of ‘lockdown’ in Scotland, as in many countries around the world, allowed enquiring minds an opportunity for reflection. The fruits of this reflective labour, as well the research and design that preceded it, are gathered in this publication. What emerges here is testimony to the marriage of imaginative possibility and technological potency: innovation as the critique of the present through the lens of the future. The student work presented here began by using design to explore the politics of the world in which we lived, the politics of colonialism, capitalism and climate change, a world imperilled by a catastrophe that threatened to escape humanity’s capacity to control or avert. Unfortunately, the students were obliged to fulfil the project under a similar but different threat. Covid-19 as a ‘global pandemic’ has interrupted progress or development in both the Global North and South, problematising a carbon driven, population dense conception of humanity’s future. The occupants of Buckminster Fuller’s ‘spaceship Earth’ have been obliged to recognise that we are bound up in a complex, inter-species intimacy, which demands that design operate as a form of politics. The world after Covid will adhere to different rules and new codes. The post-Covid world must not be the re-creation of ecologically disastrous consumerism, the inequities of economic colonialism or global contagion, carried by both
PREFACE — 15
GSA and The Politics of Creative Engagement: “for the common good”
