This year, the graduation projects of the master’s students from the Individual Study Plan in Design programme have become a continuous flow through four rooms and the corridor, as the second station on the ground floor to visit. The gathering is an inviting gesture made through design to create a ground on which everyone can come together and think about two main concerns. How do we care for each other, including the more-than-human subject, as part of today’s coexistence? And secondly, how can we move towards a shared future with nature keeping a more sustainable footprint in mind?
The visitors are welcomed by a parliament chair designed for the non-human, that poses a question of power relations and invites the visitor to engage in the impossible action of “taking a seat” beside others. The wandering exhibition route is arranged both in order to highlight individual designers’ insights and diligence, and also to formulate a mode of dialogue and exchange with one another. Visitors will find individual design projects ranging from creative solutions for urban-scale environmental pollution to human-scale design that provides aid for the elderly or care for pedestrians. By designing a home chair for people to sit on and work for an entire day, making lamps that perform well with alternative joints and found material, or by exploring something as small as a pair of washable armpit pads, these emerging designers keep on rethinking the human behaviour of everyday life in design, production, and consumption for long-running concerns. They do not hesitate to act bold, by creating their own manifestos, understanding the role of design in contradiction to the status quo, blurring the boundaries between theory and practice, and art and design by exploring the cognitive and affective potential of design. Speculative objects, like furniture with sustainable ornamentation design or embedded storytelling about social constructions, are created to disorient us and let us reorient ourselves in today’s world of constant change.
And please do not forget, there are two site-specific projects made by designers in the basement, as the prologue of this year’s Degree Exhibition. Along with works from other fields of art, these collective voices join together to speak for the underground, the neglected and the forgotten.
Chen Shuyu and Marta Świetlik, CuratorLab
This year, the graduation projects of the master’s students from the Individual Study Plan in Design programme have become a continuous flow through four rooms and the corridor, as the second station on the ground floor to visit. The gathering is an inviting gesture made through design to create a ground on which everyone can come together and think about two main concerns. How do we care for each other, including the more-than-human subject, as part of today’s coexistence? And secondly, how can we move towards a shared future with nature keeping a more sustainable footprint in mind?
The visitors are welcomed by a parliament chair designed for the non-human, that poses a question of power relations and invites the visitor to engage in the impossible action of “taking a seat” beside others. The wandering exhibition route is arranged both in order to highlight individual designers’ insights and diligence, and also to formulate a mode of dialogue and exchange with one another. Visitors will find individual design projects ranging from creative solutions for urban-scale environmental pollution to human-scale design that provides aid for the elderly or care for pedestrians. By designing a home chair for people to sit on and work for an entire day, making lamps that perform well with alternative joints and found material, or by exploring something as small as a pair of washable armpit pads, these emerging designers keep on rethinking the human behaviour of everyday life in design, production, and consumption for long-running concerns. They do not hesitate to act bold, by creating their own manifestos, understanding the role of design in contradiction to the status quo, blurring the boundaries between theory and practice, and art and design by exploring the cognitive and affective potential of design. Speculative objects, like furniture with sustainable ornamentation design or embedded storytelling about social constructions, are created to disorient us and let us reorient ourselves in today’s world of constant change.
And please do not forget, there are two site-specific projects made by designers in the basement, as the prologue of this year’s Degree Exhibition. Along with works from other fields of art, these collective voices join together to speak for the underground, the neglected and the forgotten.
Chen Shuyu and Marta Świetlik, CuratorLab
