Events related to the second annual Critical Design/Critical Futures II symposium co-hosted by RISD and Brown got off the ground with a workshop on Friday, April 29 and will continue this week with a series of programs dedicated to rethinking the future of sustainable design.
A roundtable discussion from 2–3:30 pm on Wednesday, May 4 focuses on What We Mean When We Say Critical Design. On Thursday, May 5 at 6 pm, Swedish professor Pelle Ehn (pictured above) will explore the Scandinavian participatory design tradition in a talk called Design, Democracy and Work.
The half-day symposium itself, Big + Small, Top Down + Bottom Up: Rethinking Sustainable Design Futures, runs from 9:30 am–1 pm in the Chace Center’s Metcalf Auditorium and thanks to funding from RISD 2050 and the Brown-RISD Collaboration, is free and open to everyone.
During the first half of the morning, Hillary Brown (shown below) of New Civic Works and the City of New York’s Office of Sustainable Design will look at Next Generation Infrastructure: Future-Proofing Infrastructure for the Anthropocene. Ehn then picks up the thread at 11:30 am with a session on Design Thinking and Future Making or Democratic Design Experiments (in the Small)?
RISD Professor of Sociology Damian White and Brown School of Engineering faculty member Ian Gonsher MFA 06 FD launched Critical Design/Critical Futures (CDCF) last year as a means of sparking interdisciplinary dialogue about ways for design thinking to “productively open up new horizons for speculative futures.” This week’s series promises to move that conversation forward in new and interesting ways.