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INSTALLATION, LIVE INTERVIEWS, SEMINAR: DESIGN ACT at ExperimentaDesign’09 Lisbon
September 9 – November 8, 2009
Iaspis invites you to an installation, live interviews & seminar at ExperimentaDesign ’09 in Lisbon.
Seminar participants: Ana Betancour, Otto von Busch, Tor Lindstrand, Helena Mattsson
Moderators: Ramia Mazé, Magnus Ericson
Panel discussion with international guests
Venue: EXD’09 Lounging Space, Palácio Braamcamp, Pátio do Tijolo 25, Lisbon, Portugal
Installation: 9 September – 8 November
Live interviews: 10 September, 12AM – 8PM
Seminar: Friday 11 September, 2.30 – 8 PM
For details and updates on the program: www.design-act.se
On-site at ExperimentaDesign’09, DESIGN ACT invites you to a discussion about socially and politically engaged design. Visit a seminar featuring Swedish practitioners discussing historical and contemporary projects, live interviews during the opening week and an installation featuring a participatory archive of project examples where you can collect information, contribute to the archive and print your own publication. The installed and online archive of DESIGN ACT will be continually updated with media and materials produced from these activities.
How can design materialize ideas that can lead to wider change? Can design reform or contest social and political conditions? Where does this take place – in the design studio or on the factory floor, in exhibition settings or on the streets? What are the emerging tactics, outcomes and audiences for such forms of practice?
The DESIGN ACT seminar explores critical roles for designers in society. In Sweden, architecture, fashion and design have historically participated in constructing the ideals – and forms – of the welfare state. Today, practitioners continue to engage in social and societal issues, whether materializing a critique of the status quo, proposing alternatives to reform systems and spaces, or staging participatory design processes and public debates. While too often reduced to questions of form and function, such tendencies expose powerful and political forms of design practice.
Featuring a series of presentations from Swedish designers and a panel session with international guests, the DESIGN ACT seminar at ExperimentaDesign’09 reflects on historical precedents and discusses examples of contemporary practice. Presentations by: Helena Mattsson, on Swedish welfare politics, critique and design; Ana Betancour, on architecture as catalyst for social change; Otto von Busch, on “hacktivism” and participation in fashion design; Tor Lindstrand, on architecture and performance for staging new social interactions.
In the panel session following the presentations, the presenters, international guests and the audience take up the seminar theme in relation to issues in other contexts, disciplines and parts of the world – and, together, reflect on future directions for design.
About the participants:
Ana Betancourt (SE) is a widely published and exhibited artist and architect. She founded and runs A + URL/ Architecture + Urban Research Laboratory, a design research centre and an operative consultancy organisation, and she is Professor at the School of Architecture, Chalmers University. Including numerous projects in the area of critical design and art activism, her work investigates alternative strategies and ways to operate and catalyse change within global transformations affecting cities today.
Otto von Busch (SE) is a Haute Couture Heretic and DIY-demagogue, but also a researcher at the Business and Design Lab at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. In his research, he explores the emergence of a new “hacktivist” designer role in fashion, where the designer engages participants to reform fashion from a phenomenon of dictations and anxiety to a collective experience of empowerment – in other words, to make participants become fashion-able.
Tor Lindstrand (SE) is an architect and Associate Professor at the School of Architecture, Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He founded International Festival with Mårten Spångberg in 2004 as a long-term collaboration between architecture and performance. Raising questions surrounding distribution, accountability and ownership in specific social and economical contexts, International Festival is active in many prominent international venues and was awarded Architect of the Year in 2007 by the Swedish Association of Architects.
Helena Mattsson (SE) is Associate Professor in History and Theory of Architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, a partner in the architectural office Testbedstudio, an editor for the cultural periodical SITE, and in charge of a recently completed research project at the Museum of Architecture in Stockholm. She has written extensively on architecture, art and culture – an anthology co-edited with S O Wallenstein, Swedish Modernism: Architecture, Consumption and the Welfare State, will be published by Black Dog in 2010.
Ramia Mazé (SE) is a senior researcher and project leader at the Interactive Institute – her work examines intersections among critical practice, sustainability and social design.
Magnus Ericson (SE) is a project manager at Iaspis and, since 2007, has been assigned to pursue and develop Iaspis activities within the fields of design, crafts and architecture.
DESIGN ACT Socially and politically engaged design today – critical roles and emerging tactics
is a project highlighting and discussing contemporary design practices that engage with political and societal issues. It traces current and historical tendencies towards design as a ‘critical practice’ that engages ideologically and practically in these issues.
DESIGN ACT is initiated and produced by Iaspis in collaboration with the Interactive Institute. Project managers: Magnus Ericson (Iaspis), Ramia Mazé (Interactive Institute). Project coordinator: Sara Teleman. Research assistant: Natasha Llorens. Graphic design: Friendly Matters.
For more information about the project please visit: www.design-act.se
