This Friday, April 24, RISD and Brown are co-hosting Critical Design/Critical Futures, a full-day symposium open to everyone with an interest in shaping the future.
Conversations will focus on recent advances in speculative design and how designers and social scientists are coming together to rethink the role of design and education in the face of ongoing environmental degradation, growing income inequality and other socio-political factors affecting our collective future.
Among the goals of the symposium is a desire “to critically interrogate the aesthetics of obfuscation that surrounds mainstream design,” note co-organizers Damian White, a sociologist who heads RISD’s HPSS department, and Ian Gonsher MFA 06 FD, an artist, designer and faculty member at Brown’s School of Engineering.
The two also worked with RISD’s Media Group to develop a new Critical Design/Critical Futures website that provides an online hub for sharing articles, videos and coursework related to futurism.
Free and open to everyone with a ticket, the symposium runs from 9:30 to 5:15 in the Chace Center’s Metcalf Auditorium, with a series of four roundtable discussions involving key thinkers from RISD, Brown, Parsons, Carnegie Mellon and the Freelancers Union.
White and Gonsher hope that the event will encourage members of the RISD and Brown communities to continue probing and questioning how critical design and design activism can “productively open up new horizons for speculative futures.”
