• rupture (‘rə(p)t-shər) n., a breaking apart or state of being broken apart; a
breach of peace or concord
• reckoning (‘re-kə-niƞ) n., accounting for, or coming to terms with the effect
something or someone has had or will have; a calculation; a summing up; a judgement
Design disrupts - by its very nature it intervenes through acts and artefacts that mediate and shape experience, that come between people and their participation in the world. Critical approaches to design focus this disruptive disposition inward - disturbing or unsettling elements of design education and practice that appear established and stable – and outward, rethinking design’s capacity to bring speculative ideas to life by material means. Such ruptures are revelatory and diagnostic. They disclose unspoken norms, identify taken-for-granted habits, and expose tacit power structures and relations, making them questionable, objectionable and available for acting upon. As such, critical ruptures are generative and can create openings to new interventions, that is, to doing things otherwise.
The last decade has witnessed many such critical ruptures and openings: the call to decolonize design, attend to the more-than-human, and adopt a queer or intersectional approach, to name just a few. Other schools of thought and impulses—to un-make, re-design, repair or refuse—likewise sought to shake up the status quo. These ruptures manifested in design education, design theory/research, and design practice. The results have been uneven, diffuse, and hard to measure.
For example, designers who once sought to disrupt the heteronormative, Anglophonic and Eurocentric canon now confront new challenges and a few old ones: complacency, superficial solutionism, institutional constraints, austerity, exhaustion, and polycrises rooted in enduring colonial legacies. Even though it seemed for a while that once-ridiculed and marginalized perspectives were moving to the center and power relations were shifting, such momentum is now less clear. The arguments that are made today, and the texts that are cited, are the same as they were ten years ago – the knowledge that wanted to break up the canon has itself become canonical and thus robbed of its epistemic radicality.
We believe that this impasse is partly because many important events, interventions, discussions, initiatives and openings that might lead to more lasting changes have not been properly documented, gained visibility, or achieved exemplary status. For example, some art and design schools have attempted to grapple with the implications of decolonial theory and queer and intersectional approaches, but this difficult work is often overlooked or fails to find lasting institutional expression. Other attempts to suspend existing ways of knowing and doing, and to create new situations that redistribute who knows and who does, never quite leave the “experimental” stage. Questions remain about how such theory and methods could be valued, appreciated and put into practice instead of being appropriated, exploited, discarded as soon as complications arise, or passed over in favor of the next trend.
This symposium seeks to make space for a reckoning with critical interventions that have disrupted design over the past decade. We have three broad aims:
The first is documentary and analytic: What are the forms that critical design has taken? What were the sites and events of critical design? What kinds of relations were revealed, generated or broken? What kinds of practices were created, critiqued, tried out, modified, discarded, forgotten about or reproduced? What artefacts of disruption can we identify? We see this aim as practicing a kind of anthropology of design through an exploration of its ruptures.
The second aim pivots from taking stock of the ruptures of the past decade, to exploring what they tell us about the ruptures we currently inhabit as well as those to come. There is thus an anticipatory and speculative dimension to our symposium.
The third aim is to open up the format in which such documentation and reckonings are generated, evoked, or staged. It may be that a traditional roundtable or paper presentation is best suited, but maybe it is a collaborative mapping or research or design exercise, or a co-reading or co-writing session, a method and practice workshop, a collaborative syllabus or curriculum-building activity, a collective evaluation or critique, or a performance.
