Design after Progress

For this colloquium we invited researchers Åsa Ståhl and Kristina Lindström who navigate joint practices in-between collaborations, stories, communication technology, and bodily experiences in public spaces including physical and digital platforms. They deliberately participate in unlearning design practices as progressive modes of linear innovation and instead they are testing grounds for reimagining design as practices of care, maintenance, repair, un/making, grieving, hoping and householding.

They will introduce their artistic research environment Design after Progress: Reimagining Design Histories and Futures which is based on the three rehearsal studios: Present-ing design histories, Prefigurative design practices after progress, and Unlearning design pedagogies after progress. Åsa and Kristina will give an overview of the practices tested and developed in the research studios encircling questions about care in design in the context of the aftermath – based on the project Un/Making Soil Communities that evolved around toxic soil legacies of glass production in Sweden and sensitive conversational modes that shift the focus from matters-of-concern to matters-of-care.

Guests

Åsa Ståhl (PhD) is a design researcher and a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Design at Linnaeus University. Her interdisciplinary work combines participatory design with feminist technoscience and environmental posthumanities in explorations and speculations of how to make and know liveable worlds. Ståhl currently leads the research project Holding Surplus House and participates in the research project Earth Logic Design which both include experimental design in collaboration, based on economy and ecology as integrated with social and cultural aspects of multispecies flourishing.

Kristina Lindström is a Senior Lecturer in Design at the School of Arts and Communication at Malmö University, where she is the co-director of the research center Imagining and Co-Creating Futures. She has a broad experience in working with design for public engagement with a particular focus on how design can cultivate alternative ways of understanding, experiencing, and engaging with climate change. As part of the research project Grief and Hope in Transition she has been exploring the affective dimension of the transition to post carbon futures.

Åsa Ståhl and Kristina Lindström have collaborated for more than 20 years. In 2014 they defended their collaborative PhD thesis: Patchworking Publics-in-the-Making. After a joint postdoc, they founded the Un/Making Studio that explores alternatives to progressivist imaginaries within design. In collaboration with Li Jönsson they are currently leading the 6-year research environment Design after Progress: Reimagining Design Histories and Futures, that explores how to carefully untie designs entanglements with progress, and to craft imaginaries and practices of a more socio-ecologically just design.

https://lnu.se/en/research/research-groups/design-after-progress/
https://unmakingstudio.se/

Åsa Ståhl and Kristina Lindström on Reimagining Design Histories and Futures

Guests