Why are all my designer friends overworked and underpaid?
While broadening the impact of designers to social critiques, speculative and critical design have resulted in reflective research methods that have diverged from traditional design market demands. While promoted by many design education and hinting at some valuable critical thought experiments, it remained a niche in the market, leading many (young) practitioners to get confronted to the struggles of earning a living in a field that is already precarious for most independent workers. Besides, the more traditional ways of mobilizing political power –such as unionizing– are hard to bring to concretion for cultural freelancers as they are not bound by common employment structures.
The workshop will be built around a fictional organization addressing the precarity of un-valorized design labor. Using speculative design methodologies, we will attempt to tackle some inherent and inherited issues peculiar to the field’s conditions.
The aim is to look at how these shared struggles can meaningfully extend into solidarity by practicing maintenance and care with other precarious workers (not only confined to the design field).
This workshop is a part of the workshop series HistoricALL! organized by Onomatopee. Six workshops created by six designers / collectives / curators aim to stimulate the participants to contribute to the rewriting of design history. Each workshop will have a budget, as will each participant. Together we will devise a format that fits the physical and virtual outcomes of the participants.
If you are interested in participating, please fill in this form before the 28th of February.
