‘Forms of Staging’ as a part of ‘Forms of Sustainability’ is a project that aims to look at possible/potential spaces for discussing design as an investigative practice. Examining intersections among critical practice and sustainable design, material culture and design history, Forms of Sustainability explores new roles for designers.
Understanding design as a critical or investigative practice, the project also explores how the designer involved in such practice, may develop new ways of doing and producing design. What does investigative design produce? How can design take form in ways that also open up for critiquing and investigating new modes and outcomes of design production? Besides ‘products’, how can we rethink the forms and formats of such production as new spaces for design and for discourse through and about design? Such spaces, or ‘stagings’, may take place in books and galleries, in public or clandestinely, through dialogs/monologues and other forms of discourse. Exploring such questions and possible forms, this project will develop concepts, discussions and examples of ways that such practice might be produced, communicated or translated in forms other than traditional design ‘products’. Looking through a historiographical eye the project will reflect upon implications for critically rethinking the designer’s role.
To this end Forms of Staging is focused on a concrete path:
Finding examples in design and non-design contexts where they bring up criticality through staging/curating critical discourses instead of representing a critique. Examples such as early modernism design attempts from design field and Walter Benjamin’s writings such as Arcades Project as non-design one. These examples will be reviewed by critical theories from Jacques Rancière in order to see how these discourses have been staged/communicated. By adding another meaning to the system of implications or by interrupting the regime of meaningfulness? This part aims through analyzing these examples, explores different ways of staging critical practices in design.
This project will be lead under supervision of Christina Zetterlund at Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design and Ramia Maze at Design Research Unit of Interactive Institute.