IDW2023 Storm

Milligan, A. (Speaker)

Activity: Participating in or organising an event types › Participation in workshop, seminar, course

Description

Workshop: MAKEup

Taking inspiration from the creative freedom offered through asemic writing, (a hybrid artform that weaves words and images together), this sculptural workshop aligns conceptually with existing research precedents such as experience prototyping (Buchenau & Fulton Sur, 2000) and improvisational making in theatre. My current research uses sculpture to reframe the interior as an expanded practice that plays with artefacts of the interior and exterior landscape.

I propose to engage Masters students with speculative sculptural approaches that employ simple studio materials, e.g., paper, card, tape, string, pens/pencils, 3D sketching and playful object-making with thoughtful, poetic processes such as asemic making. This offers an inventive attention to the workshop themes towards expanding our understanding of critical design through emotive and expressive experimentation.

These are valuable alternatives to the established representational conventions in design education and practice, that mostly occur near the end, not at the start of a project. By making from the start, by feeling our way through materials and responses as repeated acts of enquiry, we can problem ‘find’, and problem ‘solve’ in an active, rigorous exploration that unlocks creative possibilities to provide students with flexible and sustainable low-fi tools to develop new methods of identifying and framing future issues.

International Design Week 2023 Overview:

Invited workshop lead at the International Design Workshop Week, IDW2023 STORM hosted by the University of Antwerp in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp. In current times where extreme circumstances and polarization are hardening the social debate, designing for social emancipation, cohesion and sustainability can enable students to identify various ethical issues, frictions or social gaps. The international design workshop week aims to STORM through the minds of our students: exploring the power of the critical design approach for social inquiry and engagement through design. Traditionally, designers apply affirmative design approaches in the design process, providing answers and solutions to questions or design challenges, and thereby reinforcing the current situation rather than rejecting it. This is simply how we are trained to perform as ‘problem-solvers’ (and ‘solution-focused’). However, the aim of the international workshop week is to focus on ‘problem-finding’and explore the power of a critical design attitude: “[Critical design] rejects how things are now as being the only possibility, and provides a critique of the prevailing situation through designs that embody alternative social, cultural, technical or economic values.” “[Critical design] opens lines of inquiry as opposed to providing answers or solutions to questions or design problems.” “Critical Design uses speculative design proposals to challenge narrow assumptions, preconceptions and givens (…).” The workshop week is open to radical pedagogical experiences, which open the eyes, widen thinking and foster new encounters. It stimulates international and interdisciplinary exchange and offers an informal platform for discussing design education and its agency.