As designers, what agency do we have for activism?
What is our framework for responding to issues that we care about?
How can design processes be used to question and respond to these issues?
Chapter 1 Research Archive
Students were guided through a fast-paced and in-depth investigative research phase, using design processes as a way of unpacking a range of specific ideas and issues in a collective studio environment.
Chapter 2 Instructional Drawing
Students designed a camp ground – an intentional site for meetings, information exchange, discussion, argument and consensus.
Chapter 3 Moving Image
Students engaged with their designed camp ground as an active space – considering processes relating to event and program; organisation, disorganisation, reorganisation; assembly, disassembly – as a group we embraced the inevitable reality that all good things come to an end.
How?
How to tie a knot. How to draw an insect proof window detail at 1:1. How to build a gabion wall. How to mix concrete. How to accurately illustrate a cockatoo by candle light. How to organise a happening. How to write a slogan for a protest banner. How to work collectively. How to build an archive. How to assemble a loose framework. How to design for adaptability. How to take over a public square.How to write a poem. How to survive on beans.
Why? What?
Why did the hippies fail? Why are there so many films about the apocalypse? What happened in Biosphere 2? What was discussed on the Socratic steps? What is cybernetics and does it even matter anymore?
Who?
Biosphere 2, Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Maintenance Manifesto, Cedric Price, Buckminster Fuller, Intentional Communities, Andrea Zittell, The Hippies, WAR (Warriors of Aboriginal Resistance), Black Lives Matter, Guerrilla Girls, Pussy Hat, Barn raising, Unfinished Business at ACCA, Occupy Wall Street, How To Build Your Own Living Structures by Ken Isaacs, Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia by Greg Castillo and Andrew Blauvelt, Blueprint for Counter Education by Larry S Miller and Maurice R Stein, Radical Pedagogies, Spatial Agency, Centre For Land Use Interpretation, The Fun Palace.