In Conversation with a Chair

Mare Studio's "In Conversation with a Chair" exhibition presents through over a century of Greek tradition, design, and craftsmanship, through the modest form of the chair. 

#MareStudio #Design #Sculpture #designtheory #Crafts #KostisVelonis #ArborIntrat

Rudolph M. Schindler Armchair for the Ellen Janson House

Benito’s Favourite Chair. Waiting for the Guests to Arrive.

Rudolph M. Schindler Armchair for the Ellen Janson House.

 

#Benny #celebrations #benito#RudolphSchindler #EllenJanson#Cats #felines #persianred#RudolphSchindlerArmchair

 

Mr Robinson Crusoe Stayed Home. Adventures of Design in Times of Crisis

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNuAEUpcgXw

#robinsoncrusoe #mrcrusoestayedhome #adventuresofdesign #benakimuseum #literature #design##exhibition #crafts #literature #designtheory #bricolage#efficiency#economy #clumsiness #dexterity #postcolonialstudies

The Revolution

Robinson Crusoe breaks a plate on his way out,

and hesitates over the pieces. The ship begins

to sink as he sweeps them up. Sets the table

and stands looking at history for the last time.

Knowing precision will leak from him,

however well he learns the weather or vegetation,

and despite the cunning of his hands.

His mind can survive only among the furniture.

Amid the primary colors of the island, he will

become a fine thing, perhaps, but a different one.

 

Jack Gilbert , Monolithos, 1982 

Οικιακές Συναρμογές (Domestic Assemblage)

Αρχικά ο κόσμος θα μπορούσε να συλληφθεί ως ένα συνονθύλευμα ύλης διαθέσιμο για την κατασκευή του ανθρώπινου, κατασκευασμένου κόσμου. Στη συνέχεια, αυτή η αιώνια διαδικασία κατασκευής και μεταβολισμού του φυσικού κόσμου παρείχε έναν ήδη χρησιμοποιημένο, υλικό κόσμο, γεμάτο πράγματα, που έχουν καταστραφεί ή όχι ακόμη. Στην ανθρωπόκαινο περίοδο μετατρέπεται ο υλικός κόσμος σε έναν κόσμο πραγμάτων. 

Το εργαστήριο διερευνά πώς διαμορφώνεται η καθημερινή ζωή με τη χρήση λειτουργικών αντικειμένων, υποστηρίζοντας την ιδέα ότι τα αντικείμενα επηρεάζουν το τελετουργικό (επιτελεστικότητα) της καθημερινής ζωής. Τα έργα στοχεύουν στην ανάλυση, σύλληψη και εισαγωγή τόσο αντικειμένων όσο και επιτελέσεων της καθημερινής ζωής. Στο εργαστήριο, οι συμμετέχοντες καλούνται να σχεδιάσουν και να κατασκευάσουν αντικείμενα για την καθημερινή (τους) ζωή, ενεργοποιώντας μια λίστα υλικών από την κοινή μας κουλτούρα, χρησιμοποιώντας απλά μηχανικά εργαλεία, διαδικασίες χαμηλής τεχνολογίας και συγκεκριμένες μεθόδους σχεδιασμού. 

Σκοπός του εργαστηρίου είναι η ανάπτυξη έρευνας για διάφορες δυνατότητες, ο σχεδιασμός και η παραγωγή αντικειμένων, προγραμμάτων και δράσεων για την καθημερινή ζωή και την ενεργοποίηση του οικιακού χώρου τόσο για διαμονή όσο και για (τηλε) εργασία. Οι πρόσφατες τεχνολογίες, η ανάπτυξη λογισμικού και οι τεχνικές κατασκευής επιτρέπει στους σχεδιαστές, αρχιτέκτονες και καλλιτέχνες να συλλάβουν και να κατασκευάσουν έργα και προϊόντα, χωρίς την ανάγκη για μακρές και ακριβές γραμμές βιομηχανικής παραγωγής. 

Το εργαστήριο εστιάζει το ενδιαφέρον του στον μετασχηματισμό με επανάχρηση, με πρακτικές DIY(Do It Yourself) και τη μέθοδο του Assemblage. Οι συμμετέχοντες/ουσες θα κληθούν να τροποποιήσουν ή να δημιουργήσουν εκ νέου ένα χρηστικό αντικείμενο του χώρου της διαμονής του/της. Το προϊόν του εργαστηρίου θα παράξει μια χρήσιμη συνθήκη στο σπίτι του καθενός. Τέλος, ενδιαφέρει η ανάπτυξη της εφευρετικότητας και της ικανότητας στο σχεδιασμό και την κατασκευή αντικειμένων μικρής κλίμακας, καθώς και η επικοινωνία και προώθηση ενός οικιακού, χρηστικού προϊόντος. 

 

Το "Domestic Assemblage" είναι ένα διαδικτυακό σεμινάριο / εργαστήριο για το σχεδιασμό και την κατασκευή αντικειμένων και επίπλων καθημερινής χρήσης, που διοργανώνεται από το πολιτιστικό ευρωπαϊκό πρόγραμμα OpenUp και το Πανεπιστήμιο Θεσσαλίας. Στόχος είναι να δημιουργηθούν οικιακές μορφές και κατασκευές, χαμηλού κόστους, από την αναδιάρθρωση διαφορετικών στοιχείων που μπορούν να εντοπιστούν στα σπίτια των συμμετεχόντων και τις γειτονικές περιοχές. Ακολουθώντας μια μεθοδολογία συλλογής και συναρμολόγησης θραυσμάτων από τον υλικό κόσμο γύρω τους, οι συμμετέχοντες καλούνται να τα μεταμορφώσουν και να τα επαναχρησιμοποιήσουν για νέες οικιακές επιτελέσεις. 

 

Τμήμα Αρχιτεκτόνων Μηχανικών Πανεπιστημίου Θεσσαλίας

http://www.arch.uth.gr/el/activities/2358

https://www.instagram.com/openuputh/?hl=el

https://www.facebook.com/Openuputh-111966150573025

 

The Politics of Materials : Transparency and Intimacy

What are the limits of design in addressing political challenges? We might first want to ask: which politics? The ‘small p’ politics of everyday, negotiated, shared space suggested by the Greek root of the word (politika – affairs of the city; or politikos – relating to citizens)? This scale of quotidian interpersonal politics in the public realm concerns fundamentally material issues such as the right to presence and visibility in and practical agency over urban space. But what about the ‘big P’ Politics [1] of parties, legislation, and bureaucracy, that is less immediately material? Evidently there is no clear line between the two, and so I would like to start by looking at a failure in design for Politics to open up questions for a more material and aesthetic discussion of design for politics. 

In 1999 Foster and Partners completed a renovation of the Reichstag in Berlin, including a glass cupola over the chamber, “allowing people to ascend symbolically above the heads of their representatives”. [2] This is just the most recent in a series of post-war German parliament buildings constructed around what Deborah Barnstone calls an “ideology of transparency”, posited by futurist design thinkers and almost entirely uncritically taken hold of in both architecture and politics as the material embodiment of the ideal of accountable, accessible government.[3] However, rather than creating a system for transparent democracy, this design takes the most literal meaning of the word ‘transparent’ and looks for its material equivalent in glass. It conflates a material fact – the ability for glass to convey a complete image – with a way of doing things. If transparency in politics has meaning only as far as being able to see what politicians are doing, then within the scope of its setting the glass dome succeeds. If, as we would hope, it is supposed to be a tool for holding the political system accountable through involvement, it fails. The kind of transparency it creates is the same as that set up in the theatre between stage and audience: information and affect passes in one direction; the public is a set of eyes rather than a set of interlocutors. Because we inherited a word for information passing through material to approximate the way information passes between political actors and the public, the representation of democracy in glass has been able, at times, to supersede the process of democracy itself.

The Campo de Cebada in Madrid has become one of the best known spaces for bottom-up democracy. Following a series of assemblies debating the future of the vacant, city-owned public site, lightweight shelters and bleachers were constructed from recycled wood allowing it to be used for peer-to-peer education, performance, and local democracy. Built on the basis of necessity for and by its users, it appears on the surface to be the epitome of material functionalism. Why, then, is its aesthetic so instantly recognizable? Why have ply and wooden boarding come to be so expressive of (small-p) political? There are obvious pragmatic reasons: they are cheap and durable. But there are also ways of doing things encoded in these materials. Could ergonomic properties of materials could become political? Take weight: how many humans and/or non-humans does it take to lift a plate of glass versus a plank of wood? Ply and scaffold can be manipulated by non-specialists, giving us a ‘DIY’ ethic/aesthetic/politic. Even at this most seemingly pragmatic a relationship with materials there is a conflation of language that blurs the functional and symbolic. Grass-roots or DIY political organization literally uses the same tools and materials as home improvements, borrowing a material way of doing things and inheriting with it a symbolic aesthetic of the intimacy of the domestic interior. 

Wood is intimate. It is for building a hut, not a parliament. It belongs to the world of communality and physical affect, which Hannah Arendt distinguishes clearly from the world of the Political.4 But wood also contains things within it and traps them: it does not transmit information. It holds affect at the scale of the intimate and the immediate. Glass is implicated in the technologies of mass media. It allows mediated affect to pass through it whilst keeping bodies apart. Just as the Reichstag fails in doing Political transparency because of its literally symbolic interpretation, it succeeds in doing other things like the communication of power outwards from a centre. Just because its symbolism does not equal its function, does not mean we should not pay attention to its functionality. Inversely with wood at the Campo de Cebada: it is highly effective in doing DIY politics, economically and ergonomically, but in doing so symbolizes a communality and an immediacy that puts it in aesthetic opposition to Politics. This may well be the aim, but then how does it scale up, expand, and grow as a movement whilst holding on to the material symbols it has created for itself? Does wood symbolically trap the political in the realm of the intimate, shared between initiates to that realm, and exclude a wider public?

Text by John Bingham-Hall

NOTES

[1] Capitalisation observed to distinguish throughout
[2] http://www.fosterandpartners.com/projects/ reichstag-new-german-parliament/
[3] Deborah Ascher Barnstone, The Transparent State: Architecture and Politics in Postwar Germany(Routledge, 2004).
[iv] Hannah Arendt, “The Public Realm: The Common,” in The Public Face of Architecture, ed. Mark Lilla and Nathan Glazer (London & New York: The Free Press, 1987), 4–12.

 Originally published in Designing Politics: The Limits of Design. Theatrum Mundi - LSE Cities - Fondation Maison des sciences de l'homme. 2016

https://www.readingdesign.org/politics-of-materials

autoprogettazione

Addio Maestro

Enzo Mari 1932-2020

#enzomari #autoprogettazione #diy #italiandesign #labour #making

The little sculpture affixed to your house: Anton Fazekas and the making of a midcentury San Francisco sensation

Most houses in the city have numbers on their fronts; there are a small part of the house’s exterior decor and often escape notice. On my recent socially distanced neighborhood walks I’ve been looking at them. Many houses in Sunnyside, as well as neighborhoods all over the city, have numbers encased in little frames like these.

 

 

Posted on 15 July 2020 by Sunnyside History

https://sunnysidehistory.org/2020/07/15/the-little-sculpture-affixed-your-house-anton-fazekas/

Inside Martin Margiela's All-White Maison

In Paris’s quiet and principally residential 11th arrondissement is the home of fashion’s most mysterious players. The residents are justifiably proud of the 3,000 square foot space which they moved into a little over three years ago, which dates back to the 18th century. It has a suitably grand and – more importantly, given the label in question – evocative heritage. For nearly 100 years, this was a convent presided over by the Sisters of Charity, functioning primarily as an orphanage.

In 1939, one M Andre Peuble took over the building and founded the prestigious L’Ecole Professionnelle de Dessin Industriel. The vast majority of Paris’s industrial design luminaries from that period were alumni including the designer of the iconic Klein-blue Gitanes packet, complete with whirling Romany dancer and curling plumes of smoke.

By the time Martin Margiela and his team arrived in December 2004, the place had been empty for a decade or more. The new occupants took up residence, however, only to find the classrooms had been left in just the same state as the day they were vacated – pens in inkwells, exam papers on desks and lessons still chalked on to blackboards, all covered in a thick layer of dust. Suffice to say, anyone who is familiar with the mindset of Martin Margiela might argue that, at 163 rue S Maure, the designer has found his spiritual home. After all, the effect of time passing on the world has been a career-long obsession of his.

It took four months for the building to be prepared for its new purpose, and the powers that be at Maison Martin Margiela adopted just the same approach to the building’s restoration as they apply to everything else they touch. In particular, the use of white – or whites, in Margiela speak – was central.

“There are two reasons for white – one practical, one conceptual,” says a spokesperson. It is the stuff of fashion legend that Margiela himself has never agreed to a face-to-face interview, or to his photograph appearing alongside any profile of his work. All statements that are issued by the house are careful to employ the pronoun “we” instead of “I”, thereby catapulting the concept of the superstar designer into oblivion. “When Jenny (Meirens, the label’s cofounder) and Martin started out they collected furniture from all over the place. They had no money and it was all in different styles, so to make it seem coherent it was all painted white.”

Of course, not just any old white will do. White emulsion is chosen to paint all surfaces for two reasons, both for its matt finish, and the fact that it is impossible to clean – any wear and tear caused by daily comings and goings are therefore left to tell their story for posterity. Paint is never applied to the whole space at the same time, so some of the rooms are almost yellow with age, while others are pristine in appearance – well, not quite.

Text by Susannah Frankel, April 2015 

more : https://www.anothermag.com/fashion-beauty/7363/inside-martin-margielas-all-white-maison

Where Is the Surplus? Where Is the Poetry?

Sorkin at the Bauhaus

The extent to which collective design processes have a democratic character has not yet been answered.

The three Bauhaus directors reach out to the present: Michael Sorkin, one of today’s most distinguished architects and architecture journalists, is their guest. They want to know what people think of Bauhausian ideas 100 years after the foundation of their school. Michael is happy to answer their questions.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: “Modern buildings of our time are so huge that one must group them. Often the space between these buildings is as important as the buildings themselves.”

Continuing to drill down on your pastoralism, Mies, you are now talking about a particular modernist manner of disposing of large objects in a determinative void. But that fantasy of towers in the park (your version or Corb’s) got tire- some long ago. Not simply have other ideas come up (or been retrieved) about composing the architectural ensemble but also about the inhabition of that space in between, which you see mainly as setting. In truth, you were not a particularly great urbanist. Only when the city building was a set piece and an exception to its context – most immortally the sublime Seagram’s – you made jewels. But the generalization became a nightmare.

Walter Gropius: “A modern, harmonic, and lively architecture is the visible sign of authentic democracy.”

For those of us who were formed in the 1960s and think of ourselves as being political, the conundrum of the limits of collective design’s ability to produce good results—and good results that somehow embody a vision of the democracy that aris- es from the process of collaboration – is still very much an open question. Architecture expresses values, always. It can’t help it since it’s the home of human activities, which are never neutral. The difficulty comes when it tries to be too precise – too prescriptive – about the relationship of architectural forms and human behaviours, because it can so easily cross the line into the territory of coercion and oppression.

https://www.bauhaus100.com/magazine/understand-the-bauhaus/where-is-the-surplus-where-is-the-poetry/

Have No Fear of Modernism!

 Have No Fear of Modernism! 

Mikulas Galanda,  Still Life with a Glass, 1929-30

The Slovak Design Museum ideologically follows on from the ceased-to-exist Arts and Crafts Museum established parallel with the School of Arts and Crafts, the Museum recognises it as its predecessor. The School set the foundations of the modern Slovak design, that is why we are trying to reconstruct its history from the fragments of preserved artefacts and, as much as possible, bringing them closer to the present from the visual and documentary point of view.

In the year 2013, the book by Iva Mojžišová, Škola moderného videnia [The School of Modern Vision] was published. Its author crowned her efforts in researching the Bratislava School which she had started in the sixties. It was the primary field of her research in history and a life-long pursuit. During the Normalisation Period, her primary concern was to keep in memory the effort which connected with the School and the modernisation of Slovakia. Direct contemporaries of the School are no longer with us, and their children – as long as they live – are mostly of advanced age. Iva Mojžišová also died several months after the book release.

Organiser: Slovenské centrum dizajnu – Slovenské múzeum dizajnuExhibition concept: Simona Bérešová, Klára Prešnajderová, Maroš Schmidt
Expert guarantor: Ľubomír Longauer
Curators: Katarína Bajcurová, Simona Bérešová, Vladimíra Büngerová, Viera Kleinová, Ľubomír Longauer, Klára Prešnajderová, Sonia de Puineuf, Maroš Schmidt, Zuzana Šidlíková

Realisation of artefacts according to period documentation
Creater Studio (Ján Jánoš, Rita Koszorús, Filip Horník); Studio of Fiber Art and Textile Restoration at the AFAD in Bratislava (Lenka Hyšková, Naďa Matušková, Dominika Kostolníková); Maroš Schmidt, Kodreta Myjava, Peter Juriga, Rudolf Tanglmajer; Mária Štraneková; Faculty of Architecture at STU (Natália Marková, Dominika Mikátová, Andrea Rovňáková, Pavol Vojtek, concept: Henrieta Moravčíková); Tomáš Vlček, Dušan Kranjc, Martin Novák

Works by courtesy of institutions’ collections
Slovak National Gallery, Slovak National Museum in Martin, Museum of Janko Kráľ, Tekovské Museum in Levice, Šariš Gallery in Prešov, Bratislava City Museum, SNM – Museum of History, East Slovak Museum, University Library, Slovak Film Institute, State Archive in Bratislava, Museum of Decorative Arts In Prague, National Museum Prague, Moravian Gallery in Brno, Moravian Library, Moravian Museum, National Library of the Czech Republic, National Technical Museum in Prague, Museum of the City of Brno, Getty Research Institute Los Angeles, Literaturhaus Wien, MAK - Museum für angewandte Kunst / Gegenwartskunst Wien, Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg, and Slovak Design Museum.

 Works by courtesy of private collectionsMiloslava Rupešová, Slavomír Brezina, Eva Knoteková, Zuzana Bahnová,Svetlana Valigurská, Judita Csáderová, Čeněk Jirásko, Petr Hora Hořejš,rodina Trösterová, Katarína Hubová, Ľubomír Longauer, Klára Prešnajderová, Simona Bérešová, Klement Šilinger, Ján Šilinger

90th Anniversary of the Establishment of the School of Arts and Crafts in Bratislava
14th December 2018 – 29th September 2019
Bratislava Castle, SNM – Museum of History
The Exhibition commemorates the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the Czechoslovak Republic and the 100th jubilee of the formation of Bauhaus in Weimar.

https://sur.scd.sk

Still Undead: Popular Culture in Britain Beyond the Bauhaus

Still Undead: Popular Culture in Britain Beyond the Bauhaus

 Kurt Schwerdtfeger, Reflektorische Frablichtspiele, 1922 light performance. Courtesy of MicroscopeGallery and Kurt Schwerdtfeger Estate, 2016

Still Undead explores how Bauhaus ideas and teaching lived on in Britain, via pop culture and art schools. This exhibition coincides with the centenary of the pioneering art and design school’s founding in Weimar. Spanning the 1920s to the 90s, and including works by some 50 artists, designers and musicians, Still Undead narrates the eclectic and fragmented ways that the Bauhaus’s legacy has been transmitted and transformed. It is structured around six loosely chronological groupings, which move from the Bauhaus to British art schools, from the high street to the nightclub and beyond.

Still Undead departs from experiments in light and sound created by Bauhaus students and teachers. Combining music, costume and performance, these works were key to the school’s lively culture of parties and festivals. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, and the Bauhaus closed, a number of its masters and students came to Britain. A lack of work pushed them towards a variety of projects, making everything from sci-fi special effects and documentary photography to shop-window displays.

After World War II, Bauhaus methods reshaped British art schools through a new approach to artistic training known as Basic Design. This emphasised intuition and experimentation, colour and material. At the beginning of the 1960s, a young generation began to reimagine the aims of the Bauhaus for an era of consumerism and commercial design.

In the 1970s and 80s, youth culture – by way of art-school bands, DIY publishing and club nights – looked back to early 20th-century avant-gardes for inspiration. This section of the exhibition is a collage of performance, music and graphic design, which invokes the spirit of Bauhaus parties and theatre. The exhibition title, Still Undead, is borrowed from a 1982 song by the British band Bauhaus, suggesting that these spirits linger on, neither dead nor alive.

Artists:

Still Undead includes works by some 40 artists, designers and musicians, including: Gertrud Arndt, Roy Ascott, Bauhaus (Band), Robyn Beeche, Otti Berger, Leigh Bowery, Marcel Breuer, Robert Brownjohn, Laurie-Rae Chamberlain, Edmund Collein, Susan Collier and Sarah Campbell, Terence Conran, Rita Donagh, Terence Donovan, Ueli Frey, Maxwell Fry, Walter Gropius, Rene Halkett and David Jay, Richard Hamilton, Florence Henri, George Hinchcliffe and Ian Wood, Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack, Tom Hudson, Ben Kelly, Kraftwerk, Kurt Kranz, Margaret Leischner, Liliane Lijn, T. Lux Feininger, Al MacDonald, John Maybury, Lucia Moholy, László Moholy-Nagy, Victor Pasmore, Mary Quant, Herbert Read, Vidal Sassoon, Peter Saville, Oskar Schlemmer, Kurt Schwerdtfeger, Soft Cell, Frank Tovey (Fad Gadget), Edith Tudor-Hart, Stephen Willats.

 

Curators:

Marion von Osten, Grant Watson and Sam Thorne

Olivia Aherne, Gavin Butt, Cédric Fauq, Christian Hiller and Mariana Meneses

Still Undead has been developed in partnership with “Bauhaus Imaginista”, a major international collaboration led by Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Bauhaus Kooperation (Weimar, Dessau, Berlin); and the Goethe-Institut.

 

21 Sep 2019 – 12 Jan 2020

https://www.nottinghamcontemporary.org/whats-on/undead-pop-culture-in-britain-beyond-the-bauhaus/

Alma Buscher : “Ship” Building Toy

Alma Buscher 

“Ship” Building Toy, 1923 

 Text by Christine Meuring

https://books.google.gr/books?id=VEmZRkK2aDoC&pg=PT157&lpg=PT157&dq=Alma+Buscher:+%27Ship%27+Building+Toy.+1923,%22+in+Bauhaus+1919-1933:+Workshops+in+Modernity&source=bl&ots=az9Idb9JfE&sig=ACfU3U0b0Lne3x_PbaSP0YKg7B4Pk-xXyA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwijqNeevfjjAhWQ6aQKHal1C0YQ6AEwBHoECAgQAQ#v=onepage&q=Alma%20Buscher%3A%20'Ship'%20Building%20Toy.%201923%2C%22%20in%20Bauhaus%201919-1933%3A%20Workshops%20in%20Modernity&f=false

Being messy on the inside keeps metamaterials from folding under stress

Human-made metamaterials with messy internal designs may be more resistant to damage than those with neatly patterned structures.

Metamaterial lattices, usually composed of struts that form identical, repeating “unit cells,” can exhibit properties that normal solids don’t (SN: 1/19/19, p. 5). But under heavy loads, overstressed struts can collapse, and that breakage quickly splinters through the whole grid, causing it to crumble.

Materials scientist Minh-Son Pham of Imperial College London and colleagues realized that this kind of collapse is similar to the way metallic crystals with atoms arranged in identical unit cells deform under heavy loads. In these materials, defects in the crystal can travel freely through its atomic lattice like dominoes falling in a row, weakening the crystal (SN: 9/11/10, p. 22).

To create more resilient metamaterials, Pham and colleagues drew inspiration from the irregular atomic arrangements inside crystalline metals. In these materials, described in the Jan. 17 Nature, different regions contain unit cells with different orientations, sizes or types of crystals. The boundaries between these regions serve as roadblocks to stop defects from moving. Metamaterial lattices patterned after these atomic setups could make more reliable components for cars and airplanes, Pham says.

Pham’s team 3-D printed lattices with unit cells arranged either in perfect order, as in conventional metamaterials, or in motley groups of different atomic structures. When the researchers squeezed lattices between metal plates, the mixed lattices proved sturdier than those with regular unit cell arrangements.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/mixing-metamaterials-internal-structure-makes-it-stronger 

ARE WE HUMAN? THE DESIGN OF THE SPECIES 2 seconds, 2 days, 2 years, 200 years, 200,000 years

ARE WE HUMAN?
THE DESIGN OF THE SPECIES
2 seconds, 2 days, 2 years, 200 years, 200,000 years

The 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial explores the intimate relationship between the concepts of “design” and “human.” Design always presents itself as serving the human but its real ambition is to redesign the human. The history of design is therefore a history of evolving conceptions of the human. To talk about design is to talk about the state of our species. Humans have always been radically reshaped by the designs they produce and the world of design keeps expanding. We live in a time when everything is designed, from our carefully crafted individual looks and online identities, to the surrounding galaxies of personal devices, new materials, interfaces, networks, systems, infrastructures, data, chemicals, organisms, and genetic codes. The average day involves the experience of thousands of layers of design that reach to outer space but also reach deep into our bodies and brains. We literally live inside design, like the spider lives inside the web constructed from inside its own body. But unlike the spider, we have spawned countless overlapping and interacting webs. Even the planet itself has been completely encrusted by design as a geological layer. There is no longer an outside to the world of design. Design has become the world.

Design is the most human thing about us. Design is what makes the human. It is the basis of social life, from the very first artefacts to the exponential expansion of human capability. But design also engineers inequalities and new forms of neglect. More people than ever in history are forcibly displaced by war, lawlessness, poverty, and climate at the same time that the human genome and the weather are being actively redesigned. We can no longer reassure ourselves with the idea of “good design.” Design needs to be redesigned.

ARE WE HUMAN? : The Design of the Species : 2 seconds, 2 years, 200 years, 200,000 years invites a wide arrange of designers and thinkers from around the world to respond to a compact set of eight interlinked propositions:

DESIGN IS ALWAYS DESIGN OF THE HUMAN
THE HUMAN IS THE DESIGNING ANIMAL
OUR SPECIES IS COMPLETELY SUSPENDED IN ENDLESS LAYERS OF DESIGN
DESIGN RADICALLY EXPANDS HUMAN CAPABILITY
DESIGN ROUTINELY CONSTRUCTS RADICAL INEQUALITIES
DESIGN IS EVEN THE DESIGN OF NEGLECT
“GOOD DESIGN” IS AN ANESTHETIC
DESIGN WITHOUT ANESTHETIC ASKS URGENT QUESTIONS ABOUT OUR HUMANITY

These propositions will be explored over the coming year in events, classes, workshops, and online discussions – including open calls for responses to the propositions by short videos. This year of exploration around the world will culminate in a dense program of exhibitions, debates, broadcasts and publications during the six weeks of the Biennial in Istanbul that opens in October 2016.

This Biennial is an archaeological project. It is not about celebrating particular designers or about visualizing remarkable futures. It will be a multi-media documentary about the state of design today, when everyday reality has outpaced science fiction. It will place the extreme condition of contemporary design into the context of the extended 200,000 year history of our species – from the first standardized ornaments and the footprints of the first shoes to the latest digital and carbon footprints. A Biennial normally focuses on the last 2 years. The time frame for this exhibition will span from the last 2 seconds to the last 200,000 years. Ancient archaeological artefacts from Turkey and the region will be presented at the heart of the Biennial to reframe the latest real-time thinking about design.

Text by the curators Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley for the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial  

http://tasarimbienali.iksv.org/en/theme