Designing Economic Cultures

2011-2013

www.designingeconomiccultures.net

Designing Economic Cultures is a three year long research project that we have been carrying on since January 2011 in the context of Bianca’s Ph.D. at the Design department of Goldsmiths College in London.

The project sets out to investigate the relationship between socio-economic precarity and the production of socially and politically engaged design projects.

The fundamental question that the project poses is: how can designers, who through their work want to question and challenge the capitalist system and its problematic consequences, gain a satisfying degree of social and economic security without having to submit themselves to the commercial pressures of the market?

In other words, how can designers, who have a critically engaged practice, keep on developing this practice without selling themselves off or being crushed by the market?

The project is broadly structured in four parts:
Firstly, there is a whole part of theoretical research on neoliberal economy and on a selection of theories and thinkers who conceptualise the possibility of rupture with the capitalist logic. Secondly, there is a whole part dedicated to conducting interviews with designers and other practitioners who manage to carry on a sustainable critically engaged practice with the help of a variety of support structures. Thirdly, we are experimenting in first person with different kinds of alternative economic and organisational models with the idea of bringing back into praxis the theoretical research and the findings and ideas that come from the interviews and conversations we are having. Fourthly, a series of seminars and workshops for students about design and precarity at Goldsmiths College.

The theoretical, the dialogic and the practical are tightly connected in this project and one fuels and pushes the other two.