CODE are happy to invite you to at seminar with Senior Lecturer Katherine Moline from UNSW Art & Design, Australia. Monday February 8th from 16.00 – 18.00 at KADK, room 90. 2. 20. Address: Fabrikmestervej 6, 1435 Copenhagen K.
Abstract The communication of design research and criticism has increased exponentially since 2010. These accounts provide rich observations of new approaches to significant contemporary challenges, such as responding to climate change, the excesses of consumerism, and the growing need for socially inclusive practices. Despite the increase in journal papers and monographs reporting on design research, these publications often focus on one project at a time and are expressed in specialist language or jargon. Such focused agendas and disciplinary specific languages can render design research in speculative, and participatory / co- design practices opaque to practitioners and researchers engaged with other frames of reference. This presentation describes my investigation of design research via a series of exhibitions I have curated and co-curated since 2014 after completing a PhD on avant-gardism in art history. It will describe how developing these exhibitions and reflecting on experimental design has in turn reformulated my approaches to curation. In broad brushstrokes, the exhibitions changed my understanding of curation from a practice of caretaking and connoisseurship (collecting butterflies), to seeing exhibitions as a site for generating debate, collaborating with new audiences, and ultimately infrastructuring a new approach to analysing design research.
Bio
Dr Katherine Moline is a Senior Lecturer in research practices and Postgraduate Coordinator: Admissions for Masters by Research and PhDs at UNSW Art & Design. Katherine explores the cross-overs between avant-gardism in visual art and contemporary experimental design. Her particular interests are how experimental design reformulates strategies of historic artistic avant-gardes and the social pacts of design. Since co-convening the symposium sds2k4: Experimental and Cross-Cultural Design (2004), a collaboration between the University of New South Wales, University of Technology Sydney and the University of Western Sydney, she has curated the exhibition Connections: Experimental Design (2007) and introduced international leaders in experimental and critical design to Australian audiences. More recent projects she has written for, exhibited in or curated include Red Objects (2011), Cross Pollination (2012), Feral Experimental (2014), Experimental Practice: Provocations in and Out of Design (2015), and Experimental Thinking: Design Practices (2015). Her research has been published in numerous journal articles, conference papers, book chapters, and exhibition catalogues. As an exhibiting artist, Katherine’s work investigates how design processes and technologies can be diverted to the production of experiential and conceptual interactions and social practices with mobile telephones titled Myths of the Near Future, and a number of ongoing systems artworks, including Persons of Interest at Fisher Library, the University of Sydney.
Myths of the Near Future and Design Anthropological Innovation Model installation in ‘Experimental Thinking/Design Practices’, Griffith University Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2015
Photographer: Carl Warner
Image courtesy of Griffith Artworks, Brisbane
