Calendar

What is the place of an architecture and design publication within the global movement to address the climate crisis? The American magazine Metropolis has taken various approaches to this question since its first issue dedicated to sustainability in 1996. Today the magazine is spearheading a participatory process to create an important resource for interior designers around climate change, bringing it face to face with the political landscape in the US, power structures within the design professions, and methodologies for consensus building.

Avinash Rajagopal is the editor in chief of Metropolis, an award-winning architecture and design publication. He is a frequent speaker and moderator at events related to interior design, architecture, and urbanism, and hosts the biannual Metropolis Perspective: Sustainability symposia. He is the author of Hacking Design (Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, 2013) and has contributed to many volumes on design history, including The Culture of Nature in the History of Design (Routledge, 2019) and The Atlas of Furniture Design (Vitra Design Museum, 2019).

In the wake of our current political crisis, policymakers and governmental advisory bodies have been questioning the design and basic mechanisms of our decision-making processes. Design museums and institutions, like democracies all over the world, share the same kinds of top-down decision-making processes. What would a design museum shaped by deliberative and inclusive processes look like?

This workshop aims to probe the possibilities of such environments. Through active research and performative exercises, we will test methods and enact possibilities for the future of the deliberative museum.

Amelie Klein (AT), Vera Sacchetti (PT)

Workshop details

After innumerous months of digital learning, we find ourselves — perhaps for the first time — in a physical workshop. We are in Dresden, Eastern Germany, in a baroque building that houses the Kunstgewerbemuseum and its collection — one of the fourteen collections of Dresden’s Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen. As we land here together, we will use this moment in time and space to ground ourselves in this specific territory and place and use it as a starting point for a critical reflection around the roles of collections in shaping collective memory — as well as collective amnesia.

Nina Paim (BR)

Workshop details

How do we battle systems of oppression? What does it mean to practice solidarity in the face of structural injustice? What work must we do on ourselves before we can transform our world — and how does design, as it is traditionally practiced, help or hinder this work? In this talk, Panthea Lee will explore these questions, drawing from her experiences working on issues of equity and justice in over 30 countries globally. In particular, she will examine the mythologies and hypocrisies of the design and democracy worlds — and how we might transcend them to win dignity and joy for all. 

Panthea Lee is a strategist, curator, organizer, and facilitator working on issues of structural justice and healing democracy. She is currently the executive director at Reboot, a fellow at the Center for Science & Imagination at Arizona State University, and serves on the boards of The Laundromat Project, RSA (Royal Society of Arts) US, Development Gateway, and People Powered: The Global Hub for Participatory Democracy. 

Solidarity is a verb. But what do we act out? In ​‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’, Paulo Freire writes, “[s]olidarity requires that one enters into the situation of those with whom one is in solidarity [and] means fighting at their side to transform the objective reality.”* But what happens if this relationship is disturbed or becomes unfathomable due to increasing scale, for example the construction of collective forms of identification like the formulation of a ​“North” or a ​“South”, oppressor and oppressed, ​“we” and ​“them”? In the workshop we will critically investigate and reflect on ​‘doing solidarity’ through practices of embodiment and kinaesthetic empathy. We will build a collective and safe space to explore, how the body functions as a tool for reflection in various diametric spaces such as the political and personal or the collective and individual. Through bodily exercises and performative research methodologies, we will deconstruct complexities by looking at the mundane, in order to explore and rethink structures of social relations.

*Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970, p.49)

Vivien Tauchmann (DE)

Workshop details

Despite so-called ​“social distancing”, since March 2020 humans have made more connections than ever. The myriad of ways in which we now communicate dominate and enable our lives. This workshop will study mediated gatherings in the past, present, and future using a variety of analogue and digital materials, from drawings and models to reenactments and events. We will imagine new forms of togetherness and, in turn, design spaces which blend architecture and media into one multilayered whole. During the workshop we will explore the limitations and possibilities of communication subjects to physical and virtual mediation, between bodies far and near.

Space Popular – Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg (UK)

Workshop details

Artists conquer Pillnitz: in this new exhibition series, Margret Eicher, Luzia Simons, Rebecca Stevenson and Myriam Thyes present their work in the three palaces of Pillnitz Park and Palace. Their works comment on the buildings’ histories: floral patterns, massive tapestries, delicate sculptures made of wax, aluminium, bronze, and many other works critically reflect on the palaces’ baroque aesthetic á la chinoise as well as their royal representations and inscribed gender roles. 

We invite you to the grand opening of the first instalment! The artists will be present to answer any questions you might have. 

REGISTER HERE

In this workshop participants will be invited to examine and reflect on current global issues and use methods of forecasting, world-building, and design fiction to create an alternative future. With a radically curious, serious, humorous, empathetic, and, above all, disruptive mentality participants are invited to find out what matters today and how it affects the world tomorrow. Moving between reality and fantasy, chaos and systems, data and dreams, this workshop addresses the issues and contradictions of our time while re-evaluating positions of power and resistance.

Basma Hamdy (EG)

Workshop details

To change the world, we need to give a compelling vision of what the world can be. The workshop invites artists, designers, activists, writers, and poets to work both individually and collectively to create memes, posters, billboards, actions with slogans, and images that can act as seeds for the creation of the new world.

To help us formulate our visions, participants will be asked to select subjects from William Morris’ utopian novel News from Nowhere and update them as visions for our future. To hone and realise these new visions as simple visual messages, to design structures to present them, and to, finally, manifest them as posters and billboards in the pretty gardens of Pillnitz, the active causeway of the river, or the troubled centre of Dresden. Where, what and how? We decide.

Jerszy Seymour (CA, UK)

Workshop details

Let’s talk about contemporary design from Saxony: Thomas A. Geisler, director of the Kunstgewerbemuseum of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, gives us a tour through the presentation of the Sächsischer Staatspreis für Design which ends this Sunday. Afterwards, designers Judith Anders (Public’s Choice Award) and Magdalena Orland get in touch with us about their designs and ideas. The conversation can be continued with a drink and some snacks in the newly opened rooms of the Design Campus in the Water Palace of Schloss Pillnitz.

THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKED LIKE: A VISUAL HISTORY OF THE PRINTED BALLOT

The talk traces the visual story of the ballot, from early handwritten tickets to colorful and typographically outlandish examples from the 19th century. Responding to the explosive growth of an evolving electorate as well as a legacy of fraud, the struggle for suffrage, and concerns about voting security, the ballot reveals insights into electoral processes past and present.

Alicia Cheng is a founding partner of MGMT and is currently the Head of Design at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has worked as a senior designer for Method, New York and was the co-design director at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. She has taught and served as a visiting critic at Yale University, Princeton University, the Maryland Institute College of Art, and the Cooper Union School of Art. She currently serves as an external critic for the MFA program at the Rhode Island School of Design. 

Let’s assume two things: one, that broad participation in democracy is our goal, and two, that political systems are often complex and alienating. How can we bridge this divide? How can civically-engaged designers and other visual storytellers help people understand the political systems in which they live and demonstrate meaningful individual participation?

In this workshop we’ll work with complex content, taking it apart and testing which parts of it offer on-ramps to comprehension and participation. We’ll create and develop visual, verbal, and choreographic tools which generate mental models which help people understand complexity. Our goal will be to demystify and inspire civic participation, by explaining, diagramming, discussing, sketching, revising, and critiquing. We’ll think about the role of language, image, and emotion. We’ll try things out.

Rather than focusing on one specific project, we’ll invent a range of methods over the week, pointing toward future projects which offer shareable clarity and inspire a sense of understanding.

Andrew Sloat (US)

Workshop details

It is 2021 and after so much has happened, like the worldwide pandemic and social and political demonstrations, how do designers respond, think about, and make for our now? For our equitable futures? How much do we need to jettison or throw under the proverbial bus (ourselves included)? How do we shift and think about the choices we make, how they generate value and empower our communities? In this generative workshop, we will revel in the joyful process of rediscovery, unknowing, throwing, unlearning, and ideating in new, open, and collaborative ways. Along the way, we will make design artifacts: forms, images, stories, languages. All the while thinking about the stories we tell with our narratives about ourselves (our lineages, our choices, and our values), our communities, and how this intersects with others. We will make and iterate with critical intention, thoughtfulness, intelligence, respect, risk, love, and joy.

Ramon Tejada (US)

Workshop details

Citizenship designs the individual’s movement. The workshop explores movement and mobility across different scales from the urban to the universe. Social and artificial constructions, such as boundary, citizenship, and territory, are challenged by physical geographical elements and natural forces. We will explore different scales, such as urban, national, international, global, and extra global, in order to collectively challenge, suggest, and represent different forms of belonging through a scaled atmospheric installation. The workshop will pivot between legal and administrative definitions and personal and anecdotal definitions, with the approaches of each specifically considered. The setting will take the form of an assemblage, which will grow every day across scales, constructed from materials found around in the workshop environment.

Giuditta Vendrame (IT, NL)

Workshop details

How do the settings of seats of power characterize the different polities of our time?

The workshop will explore the relationship between space and politics through documenting and comparing the settings of international collaboration. While institutions such as the United Nations, European Union or conferences like the G7, World Forum, and OPEC are central drivers of globalization and international cooperation, the spaces in which these exchanges take place remain mostly ignored.

Reading the architecture of these spaces becomes a way to trace differences and connections between cultures of assembly. Whereas, each of these spaces has its own distinct characteristics, they all create particular rituals for collective decisions.

We will explore the spaces of international institutions and conferences, through research and design, and will develop proposals for alternative, more inclusive, architectures.

David Mulder van der Vegt (NL)

Workshop details

How do we take collective public decisions in an age of complexity? This lecture will cover the question of how to design democratic institutions and processes in a way that creates the conditions for everyday people to be able to grapple with complexity, find common ground, and exercise public judgement. It draws on the empirical evidence of hundreds of examples of deliberative processes like Citizens’ Assemblies from all levels of government, as well as the new ways in which these are becoming permanent parts of the democratic architecture.

Claudia Chwalisz leads the OECD’s work on innovative citizen participation. Her work explores how to bring public judgement to democracy to improve decision making, and how to strengthen society’s democratic fitness. She is the lead author of the OECD report Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic Institutions: Catching the Deliberative Wave (2020), and she led the development of the OECD Good Practice Principles for Deliberative Processes. Claudia co-ordinates the OECD Innovative Citizen Participation Network of leading international practitioners, academics, public servants, and designers, and edits the online digest Participo.

The event will be livestreamed at 6 pm, CET, via the Youtube channel of Dresden State Art Collections.

We are nothing except in the context of our interdependencies; our sense of self continuously being recreated by all that surrounds us, human and urban, ​“real” and not. Our metaphors, our stories, our fictions, our urban imaginaries give shape to the world as much as our social, economic and political contexts. Hence public imagination has become of paramount importance; we however lack almost entirely an infrastructure of (and for) imagination.

Gabriella Gomez-Mont (MX)

Workshop details

Shifting Perspective is a design research workshop which questions the democratic system and its flaws, especially under the radar living structures. The increasing number of people living in their cars is symptomatic of the contradiction between the promises of civic rights and the lived experience of failure. The current economic crisis, the pandemic’s impact on the labour market, the gap between minimum wage and real estate prices has intensified. How is it possible to be a citizen, exercise your right to vote, and get access to social benefits without a permanent address? How do you find a job without access to the Internet? And even more importantly, who is free to think about democracy and fight for it, when one has more urgent personal needs?

Studiolow – Héloïse Charital and Ismaël Rifaï (FR)

Workshop details