Making (Do) Exhibition

Making (Do) Exhibition
UIC Design x slvrrm design lab
Opening reception
Wednesday, December 18th, 5:00PM
Silver Room Design Lab
900 N Michigan, Chicago
Free and open to the public.

Design is a big-tent discipline that, sometimes uneasily, hosts widely-varied practices. The word “design” is variously applied to the planning of industrially mass-produced goods, certain forward-looking or critical expressions of what may have previously been called artisan production, and the development of more broadly construed product-experience systems and business strategies. With wide-ranging practices comes the need for more generalized schema for evaluating quality, if these practices are to be understood as variations of the same activity.

The notion of intentionality is one such ruler, serving to measure the quality of design work. To design well, the story usually goes, is to anticipate, plan, and make purposeful choices. This poses a tidily practice-agnostic framework for judging design. Whatever you do, do it on purpose.

This is a flawed framework, not only because it allows us to sidestep the sometimes-uncomfortable work of judging the value of a practice itself (is a well-planned assault rifle a “good” design?), but also because it hides the reality, known to all designers, that the unintended is a coauthor of every design. Much of the real work of design is negotiating compromises with precedents, expectations, technical constraints, competing voices, and pure accidents. Design is never the realization of a pure vision. We have to take the world, and the process, as it comes –and respond.

The Ad-Hoc celebrates this part of design. It places on display the acts of appropriation and adaptation that must accompany the work of design in a world that can never offer tabula rasa. It demonstrates that an object’s physical properties and cultural connotations can be assets, just richer material for a designer’s palette.

We don’t make in a vacuum. We don’t make with complete control. We wouldn’t have it any other way.