The Crisis Design Network (CDN) workshop held at the White House at Emily Hill on the 12th of July is part of a series of 4 symposiums held over the course of two years in Yokohama, Singapore, Chicago and possibly India.

Spearheaded by Thomas Kong, Assistant Professor at the Chicago School of Art Institute, and Kenta Kishi, Yokohama-based architect and founder of architectural urbanscape movement Wonderlandscape, this project aims to establish an unparalleled transdisciplinary design network that will reveal and predict latent and diverse crises in the rapidly growing Asian cities.

Apart from the interview , the workshop shed some light on the nature of this project funded by the Toyota Foundation, as veterans of various academia and disciplines came together to speak and discuss their take on what makes a crisis.

The word “crisis� is a predominant keyword in this networking project. Crisis principally means a crucial stage or a turning point in the course of some event, or an unstable situation. However, the CDN does not view it as a primarily negative connotation, rather it is merely a form of provocation, be it for design or a social change.

Thomas Kong presented an image of an empty Time Square in New York, its pedestrians were immediately evacuated after a suitcase appeared by the sidewalk. The hidden crisis here is triggered off by a simple suitcase, a world before September 11 would have found it ordinary and nothing of a threat. In this example the crisis is a trauma caused by a vicious event resulting in the change in cautionary social behaviour.

Suresh Sethi, a respected designer who once designed for Alessi and Alessandro Mendini and who is now an Associate Professor at NTU’s School of Art,Design and Media, began the series of talks for the day. After introducing his native homeland India and her diverse cultures, he provided samples of projects from design students in India who were motivated by the poverty of rural habitants. Their response was to ease the difficulty of their daily routine, to provide simple solutions rather than elaborate cumbersome ones, like a schoolbag that is also a lightweight table for children with no desks in schools or homes. In his stance, he believed that many designers were designing for the ego, or designing meaningless trinkets as a reputation-building exercise.

The issue of ego was a recurring theme, with Associate Professor at NUS’s Department of Architecture, Bobby Wong’s talk touching upon the Economy of Waste and Director of Singapore Poly’s SDE’s Jeffery Ho’s brief but sharp input on Aristotle’s Ethics in the context of commercial product design. In all, the understanding of their talks was that much of the crisis in the design context is derived from a rapidly moving consumerist world that feeds off egos but simultaneously feeds them as well.

The talks were of equal portions of the philosophical and the factual; Bobby Wong’s animism versus humanism coupled with references to John Ruskin’s musings was helpfully painted with examples of local architecture. The medium-sized group of participants, which included students, professors, designers and artists, were not left cold when the speakers from various disciplines spoke, thanks to the illuminating aid of both local and well-known examples.

It became apparent that the speakers’ expressed views on crises stemmed from various interpretations of geography, philosophies, trends, cultures and history. Lecturer Faris Akhbar Hajamaideen from SP’s SDE, spoke of the Age of Information tailored for the garbage-hungry masses, quoting the misleading favourite synonyms used by the American mass media to describe terrorists.

The age of information, he said, could also be the end of history, as he cites examples of how centuries of progressive thinking by Islamic philosophers and scientist were smote by just a few years of deceptive popular suggestions. While knowledge is readily available regardless of time and location, its efficient design and ease of acquiring may not be one that inspires wisdom.

Before the workshop made way for the open-dialogue session, video artist Kentaro Taki of the international VIDEOART CENTRE, summed up CDN’s project with samples of his work. By engaging the public, he was able to inform the unsuspecting public encountering his project of their behaviour towards information technology. The VIDEOART CENTRE is a collective involving video artists from around the world to submit their take on the phenomenon of IT. Witty and provocative, his art clarifies the relationship between human behaviour and modern obsessions. The one and a half hour long discussion session had the speakers interacting with one another and the occasionally-brave student. The debate was an expansion of the previous talks, with contributions made to reveal greater aspects of the points made.

One of the sole purposes of the symposium was to establish design as a network-forming entity. Design is a dialogical process of continuous discovery and rather than designing a product it is better to design the need that is caused by a larger reason – the crisis. With the unrestrained exchange of ideas, knowledge and observations across various disciplines and the general public, the symposium became a fertile ground to seed further exploration. Speaking for myself, as a design student, the highly-informative event was much appreciated despite some heavy topics that required a prolonged digestion period. The best of luck to CDN and its future endeavours; here’s hoping that the path of discovery will lead them to a pot of gold.

Event >> Report

Crisis Design Network Workshop: Singapore, 12 July 2008