Lecture + Workshop at the HFG Karlsruhe

Prepositional Shifts: Design Methods in the Age of Finance and the Anthropocene
(lecture, 1st of november)
Two pervasive and seemingly unrelated events that have gained global attention in the recent decade have had, and will continue to have, large-scale implications on socio-economic and planetary conditions. Both of these events, financial violence and climate change, have become popular considerations in the field of contemporary design, with design projects that are about those events as commonplace sights in recent design exhibitions and biennales. This lecture explores in how far a thematic consideration can be simply ‘poured’ into the funnel of the design machine, and rhetorically asks if perhaps another task is more urgent. Proposing that these global events are not only thematic consideration, but perhaps more importantly, methodological necessities for design practices. Financialization and the fast-pace destruction of the Earth have to be seen as reasons to refashion how design operates.

a/b/c…
(workshop, 2nd and 3rd of november)
Departing from Dunne and Raby’s A/B manifesto, which are two juxtaposed sections of listed qualities that are assigned to ‘affirmative design’ and ‘critical design’. This workshop, afforded by the theorization of prepositional shifting, sets forth to problematize the current listed qualities in this work and provokes to collaboratively construct a ‘phylum’ or genealogy that extends into a multiplicities of design methods. Manifesto’s that function as a resource in negotiating the status and functional position of design interventions. The workshop thus invites the students to discuss and design methods of design, by taking the A/B structure of Dunne and Raby as a departure-template for thinking and assigning qualities for design methods. This working-group sets forth to account for the influence that contemporary conditions have on how we design.