Exchange

EXCHANGE

EXCHANGE 8–16 October 2015

INTRODUCTION Cassandra Lehman-Schutlz “Souls are mixed with things: things with souls. Lives are mingled together and this is how, among person and things so intermingled, each emerges from their own sphere and mixes together. This is precisely what contracts and exchange are.”

Mauss The Gift Designers have always solved problems, often creating new problems as a consequence. In order for a new entity, mechanism or system or to come into being, there must be an identified absence, a requirement or possibility for a new set of relationships between ‘thing’ and ‘other thing’, person or persons.

Design as a process often does not have a clearly defined beginning or end. The consequence of the relationship the designed has with each pair of hands through which it passes has multiple ongoing repercussions, for good or evil, depending on the perspective of the beneficiary. The magnitude of each decision made along the way may or may not be recognized as part of a continuum. The deliberate acceptance of the cyclical nature of design has the potential of having the consequence of being 100% good, when every step along the way is measured in those terms. This requires an intensely deep level of enquiry, negotiation and exchange in various guises.

The manner of exchange depends on gratuity and reciprocity, on a recognition, agreement and allocation of value.

Negotiating these agreements requires that information pass through a succession of filters, be they economic, cultural, gender specific, scientific and so on. Each filter, in some way, directs and modifies the eventual outcome.

Rather than attempting to showcase the designed, the position I have taken in bringing together the works in this exhibition as a whole is to attempt to pinpoint the ephemeral nature of this process of investigation, where solutions are inextricably intertwined with meaning. Works presented her are not necessarily resolved as, within this process of creative investigation, a prescribed outcome may not necessarily eventuate.

This exhibition is part of an ongoing exchange of dialogue, between the design community of Queensland, Australia and Philadelphia. It brings to the conversation ideas in their most emergent and vulnerable form, attempting to illustrates the nature of exchange itself, in negotiating the multiple processes of design in a world where design is constantly redefining itself and where functional, practical requirements and applications for these outcomes may not yet exist.

“You continue to keep listening and it’s not about the answers” Charles M – from Arzu Ozkal’s work Getting Lost, Finding a moment…shot by spy cameras, every 20 min, during the design enquiry residency 2015.

EXCHANGE Peter Hall In professional practice, design has been conceived as a service performed in exchange for fees, but in the larger sense of the word, and in its longer history, design is a cultural practice enmeshed in custom, obligation, and unwritten understandings. While widespread and complex systems of exchange have been articulated and theorised by scholars such as Marcel Mauss (“The Gift”), Georges Bataille (“general economy”) and Jean Baudrillard (“symbolic exchange”), design discourse, forever beholden to the market mechanisms that govern professional design, has traditionally neglected to address their importance.1 This is despite the fact that professional designers quite commonly have an ethical commitment or research interest that will run for years as a ‘side project’ in a studio, only periodically manifesting itself as a trace in the ‘billable hours’ of a client commission.

With the rise of new wiki models of internet-enabled exchange, peer production, and the so-called ‘sharing economy’, the impoverished model of professional design as an activity whose value is understood either in terms of billable hours or in terms of innovation or aesthetic prowess (often conflated with the moniker ‘cutting edge’) is being reimagined.2 At the most basic level, the widespread availability of formerly specialist design tools has upset the conceit that good design is practiced exclusively by professional designers. If the job of making things usable, aesthetically appealing, or marketable has been de-professionalised to an extent, this has fuelled the repositioning of professional design practice as one of design thinking, where expertise is offered in defining and framing design problems and facilitating participatory or codesign processes. But beyond these relatively small shifts in professional practice is the sense that the economic models under which design professions were formed have reached a crisis point.

For example, professional design’s part in the perpetuation of consumerism—rather than, say, the creation of free time—was first seriously problematised in the 1960s and 1970s.3 Tony Fry’s call for a new design philosophy to expose

design’s role in “defuturing” (perpetuating and concealing environmental damage) followed in the late 1990s.4 More recently, economists, sociologists, and journalists have begun to make the case that only an overhaul of free market enterprise can confront the biophysical crisis. In her latest book, journalist Naomi Klein cites an emissions specialist in the Tyndall Centre who argues that to keep global warming below two degrees Celsius, wealthy countries will need to cut their emissions by 8 to 10 percent a year. She adds, “The ‘free’ market simply cannot accomplish this task.”5 Along with Klein, figures as diverse as the innovation-championing economist Vijay Vaitheeswaran and the anti-planning planner Nabeel Hamdi have argued for local, collaborative, bottom-up approaches to address global problems. The need to reimagine economic models is not just imperative: the emergence of collaborative, wiki, sharing, and peerproduction models of exchange are the inevitable result of the growing crisis. As the unprecedented movement of climate and war refugees dominates news headlines, it would seem that design’s ongoing transformation can only be seen in this light.

The projects curated for this exhibition Exchange represent, in a small way, a series of efforts to reimagine design economies in the context of these upheavals. These are works that respond to a call to shed new light on the art of exchange in design practice, furthering discussion and understanding of how design projects can gain in strength and flexibility as they are passed around collaborators and exchanged across cultures. With growing understanding of informal systems and their importance in crisis situations, the need for broader understandings and richer models of design practice is more urgent than ever before.

A number of themes have emerged in the curated projects.

First, a theme of provocation on the built environment, where various participants have explored modes of creative dissent to challenge the economic norms encoded into lived space. This is evident in Petra Perolini’s study of social exclusion and efforts to override gentrification with projects such as “Common Ground” housing for the

disadvantaged, juxtaposed with the city’s prized bourgeois developments; also in the Get Lost Gazetteer, a game of exchanging directions is aimed at re-mapping “the most intensely mapped spaces in the history and geography of the planet”6; and in Sell/Cell, a disruption in stock vector graphics showcases an alternative artists’ agenda for the hard-core commodification of the Gold Coast, Australia.

Second, a theme of resistance to professional design’s tendency to always want to resolve, be that in turning sketches into prototypes into CAD models or in honing a communication process with a singular message. Several projects presented here are representations of ongoing conversations; namely, Tristan Schultz’s Drawing ‘Things’ Together map of issues discussed in yarning circles among Indigenous peoples; the NO QUO collaborative book-influx; and Beck Davis’s study of gestural interactions among designers.

Third, a theme of the body and technology. If economic norms are inscribed into the built environment, how too are they inscribed into the body by the technology we use or wear and how might they be unsettled and replaced?

David Sargent’s work asks how the mediated, postproduced representation of human body shapes and sizes might be challenged not with more images of bodies but with letterforms; Callum Burgess and Paul Bardini explore how appropriated salvaged technology and open-source Arduinos might facilitate the reimagining of e-waste; and James Novak appropriates game console technology to explore collaboration in CAD. All of these prompt a larger question around both the isolating and connecting aspects of technologies of communication and co-creation: how is communication changing as we struggle to convey the complexity and enormity of a messy design problem in all its relationality?

If the connection between these themes of the economic and biophysical crisis and such emerging forms of exchange needs to be restated, suffice to say that it is in reimagining design practice that we can encounter ingenious ways of reusing, sharing, recoding, and communicating without

closing down creative potentials. This, to appropriate an idea from Jacques Rancière, is how we can relearn how we learn, by assuming equivalent points of departure across disciplines, across academic, professional and non-academic and non-professional discourses: a kind of starting from scratch. Equality thus becomes not a goal to be pursued, but a supposition to be maintained: “The essence of equality is not so much to unify as to declassify, to undo the supposed naturalness of orders and replace it with controversial figures of division.”7 It follows, then, that to facilitate exchange between equals is not to impose a uniform measure of value but to allow that give and take are always culturally and socially situated acts.

1 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000); Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy. Volume I: Consumption, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1988); Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death (London: Sage, 1993).

2 Dawn S. Booker, “Wiki Approaches to Wicked Problems: Considering African Traditions in Innovative Collaborative Approaches,” Development in Practice 24, no. 5–6 (2014): 672–85.

3 Vance Packer, The Waste Makers (New York: D. McKay Co, 1969).

4 Tony Fry, A New Design Philosophy: An Introduction to Defuturing (Sydney: UNSW Press, 1999).

5 Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate (Canada: Alfred J. Knopf, 2014), 19.

6 Denis Cosgrove, “Carto-City,” in Else/Where: Mapping—New Cartographies of Networks and Territories, ed. Jan Abrams and Peter Hall (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Design Institute 2006), 149.

7 Jacques Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, trans. Liz Heron, (London and New York: Verso 1995), 32–33.

EBALL Paul Bardini and Callum Burgess This video captures the development process and implementation of the EBALL project. The project challenges assumptions surrounding E-waste prompting the user rethink the perception of electronic waste. Demonstrating how this waste can be reclaimed to generate new and exciting concepts. Whilst playing this game, users are provoked to start a conversation surrounding E-waste.

Eball was a collaborative project undertaken at University. The project is an interactive two-player game in which a computer mouse is used to control the speed of the fan that propels a light ball into the goal of the opposition.

The design explores the gift and sharing economy currently present in today’s society by using the open source hardware of Arduino processors to create an interact game.

The code and information to create the game was retrieved from various open source communities on the internet, this knowledge helps to fill the gap in our skillset which was not present. In essence we were able to create a holistic and purposeful product by using the online gift and sharing communities available.

EBALL 2015 Digital video, (Video length: 00:02:00) *2 minutes (looped) (Reclaimed electronic waste Reclaimed wood and acrylic plastic Arduino Micro Processors)

SELL/CELL: MEDIA HYSTERIA Ministry of Agnes This image examines the play between opposing representations of Gold Coast (Australia) iconography through news media, commercial marketing and personal image making. Culture and economic power are no longer separated. Power subtly penetrates culture. ‘Sell/Cell’ is a provocative work with a disruptive tone, an alternative voice which seeks to ignite conversation. The image speaks to the sensationalised underworld activity and the manufactured public image for economic commodification of the Gold Coast with a commercial graphic design practice and ‘off the shelf’ image stock.

The voice of the artist’s culture is created through a new perspective, showcasing a new agenda—beyond the current commercial and consumerism driven identity.

Through this image, Ministry of Agnes explores these oppositions, hidden culture and aspires to disrupt the line of visual communication. It invites viewers to question how groups within society function in relation to the media and the consumption of work that subverts the process.

Sell/Cell: media hysteria 2015 Digital print on paper, dyptich, 100 x 150cm x 2, fusion of commercial ‘ready made’ stock vector graphics.

INHERENT Beck Davis The gestural exchange between people during creative collaborations is often prolific, complex and relatively undocumented. The etymology of the word ‘gesture’ is the Latin term “gerere”, which means “to carry” or “to bear” (Santilli). Gadamer outlines gesture as bearing inherent meaning “What a gesture expresses is ‘there’ in the gesture itself”.

This projection was created as part of an exploration into mediated interactions: how technologies shape experiences and creative collaboration. As part of this investigation, new and experimental technologies are used to capture the gestural exchange between individuals. Gestures are often referred to as the symbolic hand movement that present though in action. Gestures are idiosyncratic and recent discourse in the filed has centred on the role of gesture in revealing thought structure.

This work evokes an understanding of the inherent complexity that exists within gestures as well as the important role they play in knowledge exchange between creative individuals. The work achieves this representation by projecting segments of data captured from a series of interactions. The resultant: a series of moving image representations that express the knowledge exchange between two individuals. Each video sequence has been specifically selected and digitally augmented to centre the viewer’s gaze on the embodied and inherent gestural interaction. The process of capturing the exchange of gesticulations using image capture technology allowed for data to be captured, explored, manipulated and expressed in a variety of formats.

Santilli, K. S. 2005. The Redemptive Gestures of the Poetry of Wisława Szymborska. In A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana LXXXV. Springer: Netherlands. PP 729-748.

Gadamer, H-Georg. 1986. Image and Gesture,” trans. Nicholas Walker in The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 7.

Proximity 2014 200 x 110cm Digital print (video stills, augmented and digitally assembled)

The images here represent the first iteration of this work -- a series of images represent gestural exchange between des teams.

For the new work `Inherent` - the work takes a distinctively advanced technologic turn. The new work explores the use of current digital technologies (Kinect developers kit) and the methods in which hand movements and exchanges between multiple individuals can be captured.

NOTE: new technologies allow for focusse analysis on the hand exchange but also postural interactions as well.

Inherent can be displayed as a singular projection (on one wall), or ideally, as two projections (for example into the corner) t showcase and illustrate differing creative exchanges. Suggested layout for Inherent

video 1

Inherent 2015 Digital video, (Video length: 00:02:00) *2 minutes (looped)

video 2*

ideal, but not critical

SLIGHTLY OUT OF PHASE JULIA SHELL EVERY PIECE THE WHOLE Daniel Della-Bosca Holograms are a curious artefact of the digital age. They speak of future desires and ambitions. They remind us of our shared past, the moment of first witnessing r2 d2 projecting a hologram of princess Leia. They also remind us that we have not yet reached that present, and for the most part with few exceptions we don’t live in a world full of moving projected holograms. These holograms exhibited are completely digitally produced, they are designed to share the encoding of the mathematical origins of form, they are crafted to retain their sense of 3 dimensionalities, and yet they are tantalisingly untouchable and distant to the viewer. They also require the immediacy of engagement, you are required to witness them at hand, you can’t access them on the web. And lastly in a manner that tortuously opposes all that the digital age stands for, they cannot successfully be photographed and Instagramed.

Slightly out of Phase 2015 Holograms, LED lamps, dimensions variable.

NO QUO ATTEMPTS DesignInquiry 2015 Steve Bowden, Anita Cooney, Peter Evonuk, Chris Fox, Denise Gonzales Crisp, Peter Hall, Margo Halverson, Pouya Jahanshahi, Zack Kaiser, Alice Lee, Emily Luce, Charles Melcher, Jonathan Novak, Arzu Ozkal, Neil Patel, Molly Renda, Rachele Riley, Adam Taylor, Rebecca Tegtmeyer, Amanda Thomas, Tricia Treacy, Joshua Unikel, Ben Van Dyke, and Maia Wright.

NO QUO Attempts is a book-in-process initiated collaboratively during a week-long DesignInquiry gathering on the remote island of Vinalhaven, Maine, USA. The ongoing project speaks of an exchange between process and the result, residing in the mountains of collaboration; a collective skill-share method using both physical and digital CNC-cut and collaborative type, fleshing out objects-that-make-objects and lectures about design and typography. The project focused on translating location and moment, and strategies with which to resist closure at every opportunity. The title suggests a twist on “Quid pro quo” (Latin for an exchange of goods or services), where one transfer is contingent upon the other, a tit-for-tat exchange that upholds the existing state of affairs. “NO QUO” considers an uneven give and take, suggesting practices where making something out of nothing or any imbalance of expectations, power, materials, or process can become a constraint as well as an opportunity. NO QUO proposes that instead of doing what’s expected, design could be an act of going overboard and producing an excess of what’s required, or eliminating the thing altogether.

A FEW THOUGHTS ON UNEVEN EXCHANGE PE TER HALL

JUNE 2015

CASTING LOW TIDE LETTERFORMS

No Quo Attempts 2015 artist’s book, 20 x 12cm, risograph prints on paper, dimensions variable

The subject of uneven exchange (my translation of NoQuo) opens up the whole world of trading, bartering and gift-giving that exists outside of monetary exchange, outside of the restrictive terms of the market. This point relates directly to design practice. We like to think that design projects are typically performed as a service in exchange for fees, but this restrictive definition reduces every exchange to monetary transaction. Outside and inside of professional practice, aren’t people always doing favors, and trading services? In the longer history of design practice, well before billable hours, weren’t people doing design work (building, fixing things, diagramming or painting) not for money but for social solidarity, as part of reciprocal customs?

It’s easy to Romanticize pre-industrial era design, as John Ruskin arguably did in his account of the collective design principles at work in the construction of Gothic buildings, but when he advises his reader to consider the “ugly goblins and formless monsters” on the facades of Gothic cathedrals as “signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone” (Ruskin 1853, p163) he draws attention to a societal structure in which design work was performed for wages, yes, but also as part of a system that supported individual expression in the service of a great collective and spiritual goal.

The obvious reference here is the anthropological debate on gift economies, in which things, favors, services are not sold but given in exchange for future rewards (Cheal 1988). The foundational project is probably Marcel Mauss’s 1925 essay on forms of exchange in archaic societies, which examined gift economies in Melanesia, Polynesia and North West America, and observed that while the gift may appear free and disinterested, it is given in a context of “well articulated social rules” (Schrift 1997, p4). Mauss notes that what is exchanged in the societies studied is not exclusively goods, wealth and

GET LOST GAZETTER DesignInquiry 2015 Steve Bowden, Anita Cooney, Chris Fox, Peter Hall, Margo Halverson, Zach Kaiser, Jonathan Novak, Arzu Ozkal, Gail Swanlund, Tricia Treacy, Joshua Unikel, Maia Wright and Tristan Schultz, Emily Luce and Klehwetua Rodney Sayers.

Participants were invited to choose from a set of purposely vague directions, follow them, make a map of their journey and then send new directions to someone else.

The idea was to riff on a 50s practice initiated by Guy Debord and, in the 1960s, Yoko Ono, but to allow the aleatory maps to critique our newfound faith in GPS. I once punched in the address of a school I was visiting, drove for 30 minutes and then realised the iPhone GPS was directing me to a women’s hair salon on the coast. (I’m a bald man.) Before GPS was made available to civilians in 2000, it was common to ask strangers for directions. These encounters were comical and poetic: “If you get to the church, you’ve gone too far.” But they were often invaluable, a moment of trust, an introduction to a vernacular, a way of seeing the region from a local perspective, a gift.

“Turn right at the Coke bottle statue.”

Participants at DesignInquiry 2015 were sent three sets of directions, and invited to use one set, make a map of the journey, scan it and send it to me. Then they were invited to make some new directions and give them to someone else. The initial directions were as follows: 1. Drive or bicycle counter-clockwise along the circular road until you see a bank. Make a U-turn and keep going until you pass a gas station. When you see a general store, stop in and buy something with which to make a map.

2. Walk toward the water until the wind or the terrain advises you to change direction.

Pick up something with which to make a map. Repeat until you have enough items to make the map of the journey.

3. Ask someone to draw you a map of the route from their home to a place where they buy food. Follow this route from where you stand to see if it leads to something edible. Make a map of the journey.

“Draw a map to get lost.” Yoko Ono, Map Piece (1964)

“The production of psychogeographic maps, or even the introduction of alterations such as more or less arbitrarily transposing maps of two different regions, can contribute to … total insubordination of habitual influences. A friend recently told me that he had just wandered through the Harz region of Germany while blindly following the directions of a map of London.” Guy Debord, Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography.(1955) http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/presitu/geography.html

June 2015, Vinalhaven, Maine On this island, it is impossible to go very far before encountering water. On a rainy day, I follow Peter’s instructions to make a map of this place: Walk toward the water, until the wind or the terrain advises you to change direction. Pick up something with which to make a map. Repeat until you have enough items to make the map of the journey.

As I am drawing the outline of the island, I keep wondering, Am I drawing the edge of the land, or am I drawing the edge of the water?

July 2015, Mexico City This city was built on top of the Aztec capital city Tenochtitlan, located on an island in the middle of a lake. I am here during the rainy season. Storm showers roll in from the mountains in the afternoons, leaving cool temperatures in their wake.

It is impossible to go very far in this city without encountering its layered history. The past lives alongside the present. A few blocks away from the massive colonial Metropolitan Cathedral, the earth opens up for a full city block to reveal the Templo Mayor, an Aztec temple that was buried by the Spanish and rediscovered by city electrical workers digging at the site in 1978.

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I find that my phone does not pick up 3g when I am away from my apartment, so before I leave each morning I take a screenshot of the Google map directions that I will need while I am out. By the end of my stay, I have a backlog of maps in the photos on my phone, tracing my routes through this rainy island city.

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DIZYGOTIC James Novak Dizygotic is the scientific term for non-identical, or fraternal, twins.

In this piece two different people must work together to both understand, and then customise, a 3D digital computer-aided design (CAD) model, exploring the extents to which they can manipulate the data in real-time and work towards a mutually acceptable end product. Similar to fraternal twins, a collaborative bond is built between two seemingly different individuals during this time, with both spoken and non-spoken modes of communication critical to the creative process. This is representative of the highly collaborative nature of design and complex systems needed to communicate a variety of information types between all stakeholders, often in various locations around the globe with different languages and cultural beliefs. While the interactive ‘Dizygotic’ piece lets the users stand side-by-side, they could just as easily work together remotely from anywhere in the world, resulting in unique outcomes that would not occur from an individual alone.

What at first seems like a game actually challenges the role of designers like Industrial Designers or Architects, who have typically trained for many years in order to learn how to create and control CAD models of functional products. Through the use of advanced parametric and algorithmic tools, the design of any product, in this case a simple light shade, can be given controls that allow infinite customisation by untrained consumers, yet within the bounds of what is deemed ‘safe’ to be reproduced through 3D printing or other computer-numerically controlled (CNC) technologies. By taking advantage of such technologies, ‘Dizygotic’ transitions from the digital world to the physical world in a matter of hours, challenging the traditional model of massproduction which has controlled our physical world since the industrial revolution.

Ultimately the products of tomorrow require the tools of tomorrow, and ‘Dizygotic’ symbolises the changing design and collaborative tools which empower consumers.

Dizygotic 2015 Wii nunchuk’s, Arduino micro-controller, Rhino CAD software, 3D printed ABS light cover, lamp, Dimensions variable

EXCLUDED PEOPLE/PLACES: THE STRUGGLE AGAINST SOCIAL EXCLUSION – INFORMAL AND FORMAL VOICES Petra Perolini Perolini’s work explores the impact of the pro-globalisation position Australia has accepted and with it a whole range of ‘new realities’ at the expense of positive social outcomes for many Australians. By embracing economic liberalism, these ‘new realities’ have produced enormous benefits for many. However, a less positive part of a belonging to this global economy has been an acceptance of rising inequality for others. We are not all better off, only some of us are.

Poverty, social exclusion and disadvantage are increasing in spite of a strongly growing Australian economy. Social exclusion is often the outcome of people or communities suffering from a range of problems such as unemployment, low incomes, poor housing, crime, poor health, and disability and family breakdown. According to the index of relative socio-economic disadvantage (SEIFA), 18% of the Queensland population is considered to be socially excluded.

Social exclusion not only causes distress and suffering for those affected, it also results in huge costs to the Government in dealing with the consequences. The responses have largely been multi dimensional and are being co-ordinated by a range of government and non-government agencies with varying success. What they have perhaps not addressed is the need to give the socially excluded a voice.

This interview attempts to highlight the two different voices, the informal voice (socially excluded) against the formal voice (Policy makers and agencies acting on their behalf) and the processes adopted of mobilizing policies in an attempt to fix or alleviate the problems of an increasing economic divide resulting in social exclusion. My research examines the housing affordability in Australia for people who have been long-term unemployed or long term rough sleeping, using the Brisbane Common Ground project as a case study.

The study argues that the dialectic between urban policies, the shapers of our urban centres and the emergence of social initiatives need to be brought into alignment with the imperative of an ever-increasing divide. This chapter investigates the absence of socially excluded people having a voice in the ongoing debate of inclusiveness. The study also highlights some of the findings of people living in informal or designed formal communities (social housing), having obtained informal codes of practice that build on the theory of social theories of reciprocity and gift exchange which are helping to build relationships between humans and form communities.

Excluded people/places: The struggle against social exclusion – informal and formal voices 2015 Digital sound recording, 10.00 min (looped) Interview recordings from January 2015 to June 2015 Recorded at Common Ground Brisbane and Hope Street, South Brisbane Informal voices: social housing tenants and homeless persons Formal voices: State and Local Government/ Not for Profit Organisations, Business owners

HAPPINESS NOT PERFECTION David Sargent While contemporary visual design practice often claims to bring diversity to our landscape, the reality is very different. A combination of increasingly sophisticated software and uncritical, aesthetically-driven design education has produced an industry which is complicit (even unconsciously) in constructing a marketing-led visual culture that homogenises rather than diversifies. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the representation of the human body, where the imperfect, the unfinished, and the natural is being increasingly exchanged with the perfect, the polished, and the fantastic.

The dominance of the perfect ‘thin’ and ‘masculine’ body shape ideals, a cultural construction of our patriarchal society, is displayed predominately and seductively wherever we look. It is little wonder then, that negative body image has become such a widespread social issue in Australia and around the world, particularly for (typically female, but increasingly male) adolescents.

To date, efforts to promote positive body image messages have not considered how visual designers can contribute other than using the same marketing-led approaches that promote negative cultural messages. This has resulted in a variety of approaches, including the current trend of using photographic representations of ‘diverse’ and ‘healthy’ people which unfortunately only serves to replace one narrow set of ideals with another. Visual designers can contribute in this area by exploring alternative and more appropriate strategies to communicate these messages.

This animation is an experiment in promoting a positive body image message through the utilisation of diverse typographic forms, ranging from perfectly symmetrical computer-generated to incomplete, unconventionally proportioned brush letterforms.

The characters are vivid, constantly changing, overlapping, mixing and moving in and out of sequence. The result is designed to look somewhat unfinished and unresolved, ultimately aiming to communicate the message that individuality, difference and spontaneity is not only acceptable, but hopefully more desirable than the dominant cultural messages it aims to subvert.

Happiness Not Perfection 2015 Digital animation 0:59 min (looped).

DRAWING ‘TOGETHER’ INDIGENOUS FUTURES Tristan Schultz Drawing ‘Together’ Indigenous Futures explores design thinking processes of cognitive mapping, in this case ‘tracking’ mental patterns of information in a ‘yarning’ sessions with a group of Australia’s leading Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander academics, held at GNIBI (College of Australian Indigenous Peoples), Southern Cross University, Lismore in 2013.

The map ‘draws things together’, things surfacing in the yarn on the day. Together we discussed what Cultural Competency looks like from Indigenous Perspectives. We then discussed how cultural competency might be activated as an event in process across a university. The map overlays commonalities-in-difference between a Canadian First Peoples knowledge, Australian Indigenous Knowledge and a hermeneutic circle.

In this, the map becomes a chronotopal ‘mediating object’ for future intercultural conversations.

The process, moving from analogue to digital, attempts moves toward a synthesis of an artistic, scientific and journalistic interpretation of making of maps (Hall 2011). In this vein, it aims to contribute to visual forms of knowledge production through praxis that avoids aesthetic fetishisation, totality and objectivity. Four considerations of drawing together knowledge production can be seen: drawing together with the hand; drawing together assemblages and mess; and performing drawing ‘together’.

The information in the map is culturally sensitive. These parts have been concealed here. This concealment is itself a commentary on what actors and networks are deliberately left out of maps. Maps are always a reductive selection of what one decides to include in and leave out, therefore inescapably bound in wielding power.

This subjectivity in maps is itself concealed by an ongoing perpetuation of grand colonial cartographies and assumed neutrality in information design. Colonialism has destroyed, taken and concealed enough without giving in return, some knowledge begs to be kept.

Hall, P. 2011, “Bubbles, Lines, and String: How Information Visualization Shapes Society”, Graphic Design: Now in Production, eds. Andrew Blauvelt and Ellen Lupton, Walker Art Centre: Minneapolis, pp. 170-185

Drawing ‘Together’ Indigenous Futures 2015 Digital print on paper, acrylic paint Dyptich, 1 x 200cm x 200cm, 1 x 100cm x 60cm

BIOGRAPHIES PAUL BARDINI

RAE COOPER

Bardini’s two decades of experience in the performing arts industry and endeavors with product design and sculpture, lends him to be a multifaceted producer. Bardini has worked extensively in product design, 3D printing professional development instructor and is currently undertaking his Honours project at Griffith University, Queensland College of Art within the field of assistive technologies. Bardini uses product design as a holistic problem solving tool, using design thinking to create better products and services from concept to creation. Resourceful and open to any challenge, Paul a strong willingness to create change and produce moral and ethical design outcomes.

Cooper (Ministry of Agnes) explores social themes surrounding economic disruption, power, deception, mass media, culture and frustration on the City of Gold Coast, Australia.

Commercial inter-disciplinary design is both the mechanism for production and the motivation for disruption. This is part of a larger body of work, inviting exploration of the city’s public image, the visual noise that surrounds it and the historical context of Agitprop.

CALLUM BURGESS Burgess’s enthusiasm for design started at an early age as he would spend countless hours creating designs in his parent’s garage and stealing tools from his father’s collection. His passion for solving problems and creating products was evident as he tore apart every toy and mechanism in the house.

As Burgess grew older he further developed his passion, spending endless amounts of his time in the garage making whatever he could with the materials he had. His journey throughout University has led him to work and collaborate with an extensive array of both international and national organisations. From working in China for the one of the largest toy companies in the world to working for highly recognised Brisbane based design companies and consultancies. Burgess has recently completed his Bachelor of Product Design and is now undertaking honours level research investigating the applications of design thinking in startup businesses.

Cooper’s motivation comes from a sense of not belonging within the city she calls home and a desire to understand emotional displacement. As a practitioner with almost a decade of working within the creative industries, she is an outsider within a transient culture. Reflecting this disruption; she creates a contrast or alternative noise to mass media and commercial imagery. This visual presence is in part directed to a wider audience who also feel unrepresented and silenced within their displacement. Those who are not represented are in fact, represented as insignificant.

BECK DAVIS Davis is a design academic and researcher based in Brisbane, Australia.

She has a PhD (Industrial Design) from Queensland University of Technology, and currently convenes the Product Design Major at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University.

Her research centres on early stage design, examining the work of design teams and how they collaborate and respond to complex problems. Her research includes the analysis gestural interactions between design teams as well as the use of metaphors and analogies during the creative process.

Since 2014 Beck has been exploring the intersection of design, art and technology through her creative practice and has had artwork exhibited in the United States, China, Hong Kong and Australia. 

hellobeckdavis.com

DANIEL DELLA-BOSCA

PETRA PEROLINI

TRISTAN SCHULTZ

Della-Bosca is a lecturer in digital media at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. He has worked and exhibited internationally as a designer and artist and is committed to the advancement of art and design education. Della-Bosca’s primary research focus is the application of fractal mathematics to the field of aesthetics, and his specific skillsets are the interdisciplinary bridges between art, design, CAD software and algorithmic generation of image and form. Della-Bosca has a portfolio that spans public sculpture, exhibit design, jewellery and animation, all for the purpose of engaging in visual and haptic discourse.

Petra is a lecturer in interior environments at Griffith University QCA where she is a course convenor and teachers into a number of foundation courses and studio majors.

Petra’s research focus is examining the role of interior design and interior design education as a key player in the constructed environment and the powerful position it occupies but largely fails to understand. Her interests explore making essential links between understanding the complexity interior design ontologically occupies and a predominantly non-­reflective practice approach.

Currently Lecturer and Convenor of Visual Communication Design in the Design Futures Program at Griffith University, Tristan is an interdisciplinary designer, strategist and researcher with a Master of Design Futures (Hons) and a Doctoral Candidate. Tristan’s design background comes from extensive professional industry experience in product, visual communication and design strategy having been involved in many faces of the design world ranging from Design Manager for global action sports brands to founding his own design practice, RelativeCreative.

DESIGNINQUIRY

David Sargent is the Creative Director of Liveworm, convenor of the typography program and a Doctor of Visual Art candidate at the Queensland College of Art (QCA), Griffith University.

Liveworm is a work-integrated-learning design studio located within the QCA South Bank campus featuring students engaging with a large range of ‘real world’ projects for not-for-profit, cultural, educational and small to medium commercial clients. His research focusses on investigating alternate visual methods, specifically the use of lettering rather than photography, when approaching positive body image communication, education and awareness projects.

DesignInquiry is a non-profit educational organisation devoted to researching design issues in intensive team-based gatherings. An alternative to the design conference, it brings together practitioners from disparate fields to generate new work and ideas around a single topic. The organisation was founded by Peter Hall, Melle Hammer, and Margo Halverson in Portland, Maine, USA, in 2004. 

designinquiry.net

JAMES NOVAK Initially trained as an Industrial Designer, James Novak returned to university in 2014 to begin post-graduate studies in the rapidly growing world of 3D printing. Having won numerous international awards for recent 3D printed works, including the world’s first single print full-sized bicycle frame ‘FIX3D,’ he has continued to explore how future products will be customised and combined with smart technologies, challenging the role of the Industrial Designer and the relationship between consumers and products.

DAVID SARGENT



davidsargent.com.au

Tristan’s current research interests involve looking at design, knowledge and thinking in ‘cultures of repair’, especially Indigenous cultures, to understand ways to recode the significance and value in these cultures, by design, as being skilled in repair, resilience and resourcefulness; all futuring attributes needed to contribute to sustainment for all of humanity. .

He has also presented at numerous conferences, published papers and engaged in public discourse in a variety of ways.

In 2014 he completed a twelvemonth Designer-in-Residence grant through Arts Queensland, where he developed Design Futures and design thinking integration methods with Qld secondary schools. From 2014-2016 Tristan has been appointed a panel member of the Australia Council for the Arts (a council of the Australian Government) as an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Strategy Panel Member.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Exchange was funded an supported

by Griffith Centre for Creative Arts Research. Special thanks to GCCAR Director Professor Ross Woodrow.

Special thanks also to Dr Peter Hall for the curatorial essay and QCA Galleries Coordinator and exhibition curator Cassandra Lehman-Schutlz. Grateful acknowledgement also to Crane Arts and the contributions of exhibitors from Australia and the United States to Exchange.

EXHIBITION Crane International Project Space (gallery 105) 1440 N. American Street Philadelphia, PA 19122 ď Ą

cranearts.com

8–16 October 2015

CURATOR Cassandra Lehman-Schutlz AUTHORS Peter Hall Cassandra Lehman-Schutlz DESIGNERS Paul Bardini Callum Burgess Rae Cooper Beck Davis Daniel Della-Bosca DesignInquiry 2015 Steve Bowden Anita Cooney Peter Evonuk Chris Fox Denise Gonzales Crisp Peter Hall Margo Halverson

Pouya Jahanshahi Zack Kaiser Alice Lee Emily Luce Charles Melcher Jonathan Novak Arzu Ozkal Neil Patel Molly Renda Rachele Riley Klehwetua Rodney Sayers Tristan Schultz Gail Swanlund Adam Taylor Rebecca Tegtmeyer Amanda Thomas Tricia Treacy Joshua Unikel Ben Van Dyke Maia Wright

James Novak Petra Perolini David Sargent Tristan Schultz

ISBN: 978-1-925455-15-1 Copyright © 2015. All rights reserved.

No image or text may be reproduced without the permission of the artists or authors.

PUBLISHED BY Griffith Centre for Creative Arts Research Queensland College of Art Griffith University  

gccar.com.au griffith.edu.au/qca

EDITOR Evie Franzidis DESIGN Joe O’Toole @ Liveworm 

liveworm.com.au