New Origins Unconference
In April 2024, the Transformative Practices research group launched the New Origins Unconference.
There are, as Prendeville and Koria (2022) have suggested, multiple ways that design is said to be ‘transformative’. Normatively, design practice and research concerned with what we might consider ‘everyday design’ is exemplified by the design of products, services and processes that are in service to economic growth imperatives; interpretative approaches to design shift towards an acknowledgment of the context and situation of design and the place of users in acts of participation and co-creation; critical design introduces a political and activist dimension to acts of designing which—although often speculative, playful and occasionally dissenting—nevertheless fail to shape real-world design practices (Malpass, 2015); and finally, dialogic design aims to push at the boundaries of social order to amplify marginalized voices and practices, working against elite privilege.
On a continuum of transformation-by-design, design researchers can be found operating at either end of the scale yet, arguably, their work may leave lasting impressions on the individuals, publics and environments that they encounter. We operate, as Ely & Geneste point out, in a ‘design value helix’ in which our designerly conduct may manifest in untimely, unanticipated ways: what we set out to transform today may not be transformed (positively or negatively) until decades hence and with consequences for human and other species who were not intended as the recipients of our design interventions.
New Origins: A Transformative Practices Unconference[1] aims to explore the normative, reflective, participatory, speculative and dialogical work of designing in the context of generative futuring—a process of iterative, collaborative and discursive world-building and un-building—close to the origin of the Industrial Revolution in Stockport, Greater Manchester. The aim is to support the development of new networks, knowledge and transformative action within (and beyond) the Design Department at MMU and the communities of Greater Manchester and—explicitly—bring individuals together for the development of research grant applications, new research collaborations and eventual publication.
Four themes underpin the Unconference:
Playful Making and Hybrid Worlds
Pushing at the intersection of material and immaterial practices, we explore how acts of making and crafting are conceived as ‘play’ in the context of digital and hybrid technologies. In this strand we explore the cooperative aspects of craft as transcending what Sennett describes as “mutual support” (2013) to consider the potentialities brought about through playful exploration and mischievous curiosity. According to Sennett, cooperation “is wrapped in the experience of mutual pleasure” (2013:5) and in playful contexts we see individual play move towards collective experience through competitive intentions. The Playful Making strand of New Origins interrogates how the acceleration of access to increasingly complex digital technologies (AR/XR, physical computing, sensors and motion capture) invite forms of making that exploit the grey areas of the designed intentions of digital software and their related devices.
Radical Information Futures
Data permeates our everyday lives yet the information that emerges (and the way we acquire, parse, represent, refine, and interact with this information) suggests that the information infrastructures that have been designed for us no longer serve our social, cultural or spiritual needs. In this strand of New Origins, we explore what the future of our familiar information infrastructures could (and should) be. What if, as Cory Doctorow has suggested, we “seize the means of computation” in an inter-operable, community-owned internet of products and services? What if the inadequate interfaces of the search engine and AI prompt were reimagined? What might bedtime reading look like in fifty years? How might musicians and writers publish their work in a world free of Big Tech? The Radical Information Futures researchers apply their expertise in more-than-human design, information design and interaction design to experiment with ideas for information futures.
Designing Countercultural Heritage
This strand brings together design researchers, historians, curators and communities to explore how Galleries, Libraries, and Museums, Historic Houses can be reimagined as sites of civic discourse and representation bringing to the fore marginalised, countercultural perspectives often overlooked in acts of heritage-making. Here, we explore the development of new ways of designing with and for communities, shedding light on the world of amateur collections, new ways of interacting with stories of the past, whilst shaping better present and futures. Building on AHRC-funded work on Alternative Heritage Futures and Counter-framing in Design, this strand brings together emerging ideas on participatory design, design for cultural heritage and design futures from across the UK and Europe to develop a new research paradigm of designing for countercultural heritage.
Design for Cohesion
In conceptualising the idea of New Origins we consider the detrimental effect of unchecked material growth and market economics which have wrought havoc on our infrastructures of health and wellbeing, the social fabric that once kept communities together and the damage to the environment. Rather than seeing ‘creativity’ as a panacea for post-industrial, post-consensus disillusionment[2], here we examine ways that design might, pragmatically and sensitively, be applied to working with communities—spanning grass-roots activism, graffiti art, health-service design and sustainable communities. The research invites critical exploration of the politics of design (and design for policy), representation and sustainable futures.
[1] The origins of the ‘Unconference’ are explored in this paper from researchers at Murdoch University, Australia: Greenhill, K., & Wiebrands, C. (2008). The unconference: a new model for better professional communication. Poropitia Outside the Box: LIANZA Conference, 2-5 November 2008. https://researchportal.murdoch.edu.au/esploro/outputs/991005540699507891
A more recent look at Unconferences in the COVID era and advice and guidance on their format can be found here: Park, S., Kang, E.-J., Joy, K., Bellini, R., Lumbroso, J., Metaxa, D., & Monroy-Hernández, A. (2023). The Future of Conferences Is Unconferences: Exploring a Decentralized Network of Regional Meetups. Interactions, 30(5), 50–53. https://doi.org/10.1145/3612939
[2] Charles Landry warned us as far back as 2006 that major cities’ focus on creativity and the creative class (including Manchester) emergent from the popularity of Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class presented a danger of the concept being hyped out of favour. (See Landry (2006) The Art of City Making, Earthscan/Comedia: London/Sterling VA, pp. 386-387).
References
Doctorow, C. (2023). The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation. Verso Books.
Ely, P., & Geneste, L. (2020). Spinning in Helices: Design and the Question of Value. Design Management Journal, 15(1), 1–14. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/dmj.12059
Malpass, M. (2015). Criticism and Function in Critical Design Practice. Design Issues, 31(2), 59–71. https://doi.org/10.1162/DESI_a_00322
Prendeville, S., & Koria, M. (2022). Design Discourses of Transformation. She Ji, 8(1), 65–92. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2022.01.002
Sennett, R. (2013) Together: The Rituals, Pleasures & Politics of Cooperation. London: Penguin Books