Handle With Care: Curatorial Practice by Design

Hans Ulrich Obrist argues that curating allows us to create new futures. With this studio, we hope to create new futures for design through curation. This studio will look at contemporary curatorial practices in the expanded field of design. Through this studio you will imagine new ways, places and contexts to engage with the discipline and its public.

Platform agnostic, conceptually driven and highly experimental, this studio asks where, how and why we exhibit design, in order to generate conversations around the futures, forms and functions of design in society.

The guiding principle on which this studio is founded stems from the original meaning of 'curating' which is to 'take care'; you will be taking care of design, its ideas, its artefacts, its authors, and how these can combine to be shared through its communities.

Case studies of current and past exhibitions, platforms and technologies will provide the background for new experiments and research into methods for situating and translating design.

The studio will also engage with the Communication Design graduating cohort and the School of Design in general, in order to apply some of these emerging curatorial design practices in a final end-of-year public event and/or series of publications.

Multiple student-driven exhibition and publication opportunities - including web, print and environmental graphics - will emerge from this studio throughout the semester, including the opportunity to develop, organise and run the 2019 Grad Show with the third year graduating students.

Through student-driven hands-on group and individual projects, this studio will test experimental methods in curating design. You will undertake critical research into materials; installation practices; web and digital communication; systems of archiving; wayfinding, environmental graphics, signage and didactics; interactive displays; project and resource management; critical writing; communications and press; as well as publication, poster and collateral design.
Ask questions of design, rinse, repeat.

There are Three assessment tasks:
Brief #1: Speculative Exhibition Proposal
Brief #2: Curatorial Project Contribution
Brief #3: SKO [Diarised working record and documentation of course]

"Ways of Curating," by Hans Ulrich Obrist
"Exhibition." Edited by Lucy Steeds
Damn Magazine: www.damnmagazine.net/2013/07/06/design-curating

Bachelor of Design (Communication Design), School of Design

Designing Experiences, Design and the Post-Digital, Designing Identity, Designing through Image, Designing Publications, Designing Disobedience

This studio will require energy, courage, an open outlook. The course will require additional hours towards the end of semester, and will conclude in Week 14 with the public event launch. Contact hours will be distributed according to the needs of the course and discussed as a group in the first week. Please allow for this slightly different time-frame in your planning.