Design as Re-enchantment
DI2024 Tri-inquiry: Warsaw - Vinalhaven - Fallingwater
Design can be an act of re-enchantment, breathing new life into old things, transforming the mundane into new ways of seeing and being in the world. This transformative act is easily forgotten as we fixate on the finished outcomes: the photographed buildings, objects, typefaces, clothes, interiors. This year, in three separate gatherings, DesignInquiry is looking into these moments of metamorphosis: design as a super-material, hands-on process of discovery, collaboration and reinvention.
DI Warsaw: Repair/Podreperowac
July 28 – Aug 2, 2024 Apply Now
Cities are constantly being rebuilt, reinvented, and patched up, and this is the unsung subject of design history: repair. When things break, they reveal their true nature. When they’re fixed they are re-enchanted. Warsaw, the “Phoenix city” that rose from the ashes of 1945 to become a thriving cultural and political hub, will be the site of a creative investigation into the idea of repair as a continuous process that keeps cities running, reimagining and reinventing themselves, sometimes with the scarcest resources. We will be hosted by the Centre for Architecture and Urbanism and the School of Form, which are graciously lending us space and facilities for screen-printing: how might acts of repair be celebrated, communicated and enacted in the visual urban fabric?
DI Vinalhaven: Living a Making
June 23 – 29, 2024
In a time characterized by moral chaos and a careless indifference to a fragile planet, political theorist Wendy Brown suggests that the only way forward is to “confront the predicaments of meaning making today” and to “rise to the challenge of creating a world absent its givenness.” Can we accept this invitation and respond through forms of attention? Through critical fabulation? By staying with the trouble? The Living a Making DesignInquiry takes place on Vinalhaven, an island off the coast of Maine, and invites makers and thinkers from all disciplines to start from the finish, lighten your load, and reshape how you live your making. Collectively we’ll build a library of tools, share practices, and make do with what we have, foraging, swapping, and engaging with the materials that are abundantly overlooked/underutilized/unacknowledged.
This Inquiry is full; send along questions, suggestions, or contributions from afar.
DI Fallingwater: Solid/liquid/gas
November 14-21, 2024
Entropy: Concerning how the universe tends towards a state of maximum disorder. A 6-night stay at the High Meadow Residence at Fallingwater. The Bear Run Nature Preserve provides additional plein air space. Full details to follow.
DI Fellows
The 2024 DesignInquiry Fellows will be concluding their fellowships at 4th Space at Concordia University in Montreal from 25–28 June 2024. Over four days the fellows will be producing outcomes from their collaborative year. And there are opportunities for DI alums and the public to visit and interact.
On Wednesday 26 June, they will be hosting a workshop open to the public from 12-2pm. If you’re in Montreal please stop by.
Friday 28 June will be an open viewing of their pop-up exhibition.
4th Space is “mash-up of a living lab, science centre, design showroom, exhibition space and theatre set, designed to connect people with knowledge creation.”
More about the DesignInquiry Fellowship Program
thinking + making at around / work
If you weren’t working, what work would you be working on? If you weren’t going to work, where would you be going? When asked to work, do you say, “I would prefer not to?” And if so, what would you prefer?
Last summer, DesignInquiry welcomed 21 curious participants to around / work, a six-day residency in Vinalhaven, Maine, where we considered vexing questions about how we spend our time. We invite you to explore the website archive of outcomes that mark moments, go with the flow, do less, work together, keep going, give or take, fall apart, stir the pot, apologize, play and rest. Designed by Lucinda Hitchcock and Lauren Holden, the site gathers around/work participant thinking and making. Enjoy.
Printed Matter NYC
Some of DesignInquiry’s fabulous small-print-run publications were on show at the New York Art Book Fair in April 2024, at the stall of Tricia Treacy, DI alum and printmaker extraordinaire. Other DI alumni at the Fair included Nicole Killian and Nathan Ross Davis.
Join us
DesignInquiry invites you to participate from afar: Join us on our Discord server to contribute to the ideas, critique, resources, articles, images, video, writing, etc. and add your address to DI’s snail mail database to sometimes receive happy mail.
(If you are new to Discord, here’s a beginner’s guide).
DesignInquiry is a non-profit educational organization devoted to researching design issues in intensive team-based gatherings. An alternative to the design conference, it brings together practitioners from disparate fields to generate new work and ideas around a single topic.
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