Abstract
We, two design researchers, citizens from India and China, had planned our wedding as a performative design act on the Indo China border. As we neared our performance site from either side, a border dispute broke out and there was a military stand-off between our armies keeping us separated by over a hundred kilometres. From this field-based project, we present three different design outputs: our designed wedding rings, then our wedding video shot at the border and a speculative architectural design program for wedding venues on political borders. In reflection we present the process of arriving at the decisions of these three different design artefacts and articulate three forces, namely profile, politics and potential of the border as shaping these design outputs. We attribute these characteristics of the Indo-China border as forces of design agency. With this we also present designing personal events as a discursive genre for Research-through-Design.
Keywords
RtD genre, Field based Design Practice, Constructive Design Research, Border Studies
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2020.220
Citation
Acharya, K., and Wu, Y. (2020) “Where is your other half?”: A Wedding shaped by the Profile, Politics and Potential of the Indo-China Border, in Boess, S., Cheung, M. and Cain, R. (eds.), Synergy - DRS International Conference 2020, 11-14 August, Held online. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2020.220
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
“Where is your other half?”: A Wedding shaped by the Profile, Politics and Potential of the Indo-China Border
We, two design researchers, citizens from India and China, had planned our wedding as a performative design act on the Indo China border. As we neared our performance site from either side, a border dispute broke out and there was a military stand-off between our armies keeping us separated by over a hundred kilometres. From this field-based project, we present three different design outputs: our designed wedding rings, then our wedding video shot at the border and a speculative architectural design program for wedding venues on political borders. In reflection we present the process of arriving at the decisions of these three different design artefacts and articulate three forces, namely profile, politics and potential of the border as shaping these design outputs. We attribute these characteristics of the Indo-China border as forces of design agency. With this we also present designing personal events as a discursive genre for Research-through-Design.