2024–25 Public Seminar Series: Danielle Aubert

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What can design do?

This year’s public seminar series asks four invitees to reflect on design’s capacities, potentials, and failures. What are the everyday realities of our practice, and where has it surprised us? What future social roles might design play? And where and why have we seen it fall short? In this deeply uncertain time, we may at least be able to specify something about our practice and its place in the world: What can design do?

Danielle Aubert’s work examines materials, methods of production, machines, and labor. She is the author of The Detroit Printing Co-op: The Politics of the Joy of Printing (2019), which documents the work of a Detroit anarchist print shop that produced tens of thousands of pamphlets, posters, and books in the 1970s. She has also published 16 Months’ Worth of Drawings in Microsoft Excel (2006) and Marking the Dispossessed (2015). With Lana Cavar and Natasha Chandani, she co-wrote Thanks for the View, Mr. Mies (2012). Aubert has been involved in social justice, labor activism, and coalition work in Detroit for many years.

The UIC School of Design public seminar series serves as a research platform for the school's MDes program, stimulating broad intellectual inquiry about the values guiding the designer by promoting discourse across industrial and graphic design.

Thursday, November 14
6:30–7:30 pm
Room 1100
Architecture and Design Studios
845 West Harrison Street, Chicago

Free and open to the public.