from the DeepMind of Josh Plough

Bring me back to the Collective DeepMind

12.

Such simple sentences can become the avant-garde of how we restructure the design industry and its satellite scenes. Let’s push back against the emphasis that’s put on the word ‘normal’ when we’re told to embrace the novelty of our situation. We don’t have to have the old structures foistered on us again, at least not in their entirety. We can break through, with vigour.

The following essay will delve into how we can maybe do so by placing the mental health of the practitioner at the centre of a future. Foistered serves as an example of the malleability of language, its prescience and its ability to act as a kind of philosopher’s stone of futures. Lingering in the shadow of such a word we can ask: if the language starts to change, how would the practice?

There is tendency at the moment to force theory into every corner of our designer lives. To squeeze it in with such pressure that it starts to seep out; ironically turning content into surface and reducing it to pattern, both literally and metaphorically. To delve into the histories of art and design and note this “turn” would be pointless. Because from this particular angle, peering through and over my screen, the fires are still raging: environmentally, politically, technologically.