from the DeepMind of Josh Plough

Bring me back to the Collective DeepMind

38.

Tackling this at the educational level can give us the confidence to then challenge it beyond the walls of the academy. Demanding a more collaborative and trust based approach to how our work and research is received. This is where we can differentiate between whether we want to be publishing our work (historic) or channeling it (octopus approach).

The design research exhibition, as it is, is another hierarchy of sorts. One that places the object, the form, the solution, on a pedestal. Once you look at the passivity of this current structure and its innate ability to smother 99% of research’s potential; you see that it’s a format that pushes for surface. So again, we’re back to the historic paradigm of creative energy dully transmogrified into intention instead of action (this is equally valid for symposiums, et al.).

So what would a tentacle exhibition look like?

Well, it could follow quite naturally from the model of the academy. One where we focus on collaboration and the exhibition space as a nexus of action. It needs to be a constellation of intellectual and physical webs that allows designers to graft their projects closer to their subjects, utilising the creative energy to power movement. It would also have Morris’s statement ‘which will you keep, the name or the thing?” at its core. If we want to practice critical design, or any form of the discipline that has a social angle, then we need to be able to channel our work into crevices where they can have most effect: or at least the potential for effect. Something current exhibition formats simply do not do.