scenarios explored here aim to shed light on the presumptions that lie behind current design processes, and propose new ways forward. As each scenario is encountered, the narrative aims to trigger an interrogation: what worlds are being perpetuated here? What worlds do we want to perpetuate? This strategy is born out of an historic problem with exhibiting designed objects, which goes back to the Great Exhibitions of the 19th century: displayed like sculptures on pedestals or framed like paintings on walls, the designed artefact is inevitably cast in a value system—or fiction – which construes it as formal, finished object. In Design in Flux, we seek for design to be recast (or recoded) as unfinished, as a process in which the design continues to happen after the completion of production and distribution. This should, by now, be clear to anyone who has experienced how a designed thing—be it a car, highway, tax form or phone—designs behaviours to accompany it. A design goes on designing. The designing agency of technology is one theme of this exhibition. Design in Flux is also meant to signify that in its current state of fluency, design,
or what we have come to consider the official domain of design—the practices of those who call themselves designers—is equally mutable. Digital and custom methods of manufacturing, the decline of print publishing, the emergence of “design thinking” all present an environment in which definitions are being challenged and disciplinary boundaries are being dissolved. Such is the complexity of contemporary design problems that a designer or design educator who clings to the walls of a disciplinary silo and ignores social, political, environmental and extradisciplinary concerns, is increasingly in danger of irrelevance. The working hypothesis is that a designer of the future needs both disciplinary, practical skills and skills of synthesis, an ability to understand “matters of concern” (as Bruno Latour put it) as part of a relational picture. This challenge is made particularly urgent by the shifts taking place around us: climate change, population growth and the depletion of natural resources have significantly shifted the way that ordinary people around the world design. It is perhaps the West where adaptation has been, in some cases, slowest, where we cling onto standardized notions of an acceptable “standard of living” fomented in the post-war years.
The work in the show was initiated by design practitioners and researchers in Australia, at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. In curating the work, a subtext emerged in that the view from the margins, the proverbial borders of design is, lately, swimming into sharp focus. In Australia, where thin, sun-bleached and infertile soils, periodic flooding, drought, water-shortage, over-grazing, cyclones, and a hole in the ozone layer have cast a harsh light over imported farming and habitation practices, we also operate in a country that has for the last century or so, systematically mined and exported its precious resources. As the geographer Jared Diamond has written, Australia gives us a “foretaste of problems that actually will arise elsewhere in the First World if present trends continue.” We are, in some senses, at the forefront of change, and yet struggling to shift our design practices into a gear that stands any chance of coping with that change. Hence the need to recode and rethink through narratives. As Tony Fry puts it, “Transformative action begins with the creation of a narrative and an image that is directive of a critical approach, detailed planning and co-ordinated, well-executed designed action in space and time.”