Abstract
The overall objective of this paper is to position the critical design exhibition as a context of discovery – a material space for thinking – distancing itself from the more didactic forms of exhibitions that still dominate practice today, and to pose ways to establish a far more dynamic and open relation between critical design and its staging. What will follow will be an examination of critical design as a form of research which seeks not so much to make explicit knowledge production but rather to provide a space for thinking. Consequently critical design is an open undertaking centred on thinking in, through, and with design. I propose the exhibition as epistemic environment for critical design, an environment that secures and creates conditions to support the thinking dimension of critical design practice while unlocking an active agency in the audience. It is a space where research and knowledge production is evoked in situ and in action, reflecting the search for an exhibition practice which moves beyond simple communication to a form of embodiment that embraces collaboration, and experimentation.
Keywords
critical design; exhibition; embodied criticality; epistemic space
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2018.568
Citation
Russell, G. (2018) The Critical Design Exhibition: an epistemic space, in Storni, C., Leahy, K., McMahon, M., Lloyd, P. and Bohemia, E. (eds.), Design as a catalyst for change - DRS International Conference 2018, 25-28 June, Limerick, Ireland. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2018.568
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
The Critical Design Exhibition: an epistemic space
The overall objective of this paper is to position the critical design exhibition as a context of discovery – a material space for thinking – distancing itself from the more didactic forms of exhibitions that still dominate practice today, and to pose ways to establish a far more dynamic and open relation between critical design and its staging. What will follow will be an examination of critical design as a form of research which seeks not so much to make explicit knowledge production but rather to provide a space for thinking. Consequently critical design is an open undertaking centred on thinking in, through, and with design. I propose the exhibition as epistemic environment for critical design, an environment that secures and creates conditions to support the thinking dimension of critical design practice while unlocking an active agency in the audience. It is a space where research and knowledge production is evoked in situ and in action, reflecting the search for an exhibition practice which moves beyond simple communication to a form of embodiment that embraces collaboration, and experimentation.