Public Seminars

Chris Rudd
Danielle Aubert
Studio Gorm

The 2024–30325 Public Seminar Series asks four invitees to reflect on design’s capacities, potentials, and failures. What are the everyday realities of our practice, and where has it surprised us? What future social roles might design play? And where and why have we seen it fall short? In this deeply uncertain time, we may at least be able to specify something about our practice and its place in the world: What can design do?

Nu Goteh
Lani Adeoye
Fernando Laposse
Renata Graw

Eric Von Haynes
Paul Hatch 
Terry Irwin  
Talia Cotton 

The 2022–2023 Public Seminar Series theme, in contrast to previous years, was specifically and intentionally Un-themed. Arranged by a small core group of faculty and graduate students, the question of being Un-themed allowed invited guest speakers to dive deeply into their own specific niches of the design world, without constraint or boundaries of pre-imposed questions. Additionally, this allowed the speakers to bring something unquestionably and uniquely “them” to the table, which resulted in VR demonstrations, one-day workshops, and impromptu mini exhibitions. 

Ti Chang
Peter Bil’ak
OOMK
Ani Liu

This seminar series was developed by the UIC School of Design MDes graduate students. The series grapples with the reactionary paradigm shift in social norms due to the global pandemic. 

Sarah Cantor Aye
Kikko Paradela

Where does upending end up? When the ‘up’ becomes the ‘end’ so that the ‘end’ becomes the ‘up,’ will we eventually end up in the same place we were before? What is in between ‘the end’ and ‘the up’ and how might these points of reference shift?

Context and space matter: viewing a subject, object, or method from a different perspective can serve as a rich starting point for upending. There are countless ways to interact, sniff, touch, look, and listen. Makers, thinkers, maker/thinkers, and thinker/makers may come to similar topics of speculation through their own lenses—work that encourages not only contemplation and discussion but action.

What are the practical consequences and applications of speculation? Where does upending end up? UIC School of Design graduate public seminar series aimed to critically examine flipping, twisting, tipping, inverting, reversing, overturning, and upending—inviting speculation on the potentiality of ending up.

Giffin’TerMeer
Martin Venezky
Gato Negro
Stephanie and Bruce Tharp

This seminar series explores the boundaries and overlaps between design and craft, investigating contemporary positions in design that incorporate craft as a form of critical design practice.

At a time when the reindustrialization of America is attracting growing interest, craftsmanship is making a counter-resurgence. Contemporary designers incorporate artisanal processes, materials, and the flaws of the handmade in their work, while museums are demonstrating a renewed interest in “feminine” subjects such as fiber and ceramics. Technology enables artisanal practices—3D printing allows designers to make, customize, and repair on their own; and to serve as editor, publisher, and distributor.

While craft skills and processes have often been integral to industrial production, this revival may reflect a response to the negative consequences of modernization, globalization, and abusive labor conditions in the developing world, as it did for the Arts and Crafts movement and the early years of the Bauhaus. Or perhaps it provides an antidote to the pervasiveness of mechanistic production and the digital world, allowing space for disciplinary skill, obsessive focus, and what sociologist Richard Sennett calls “the special human condition of being engaged.” Whether a form of cultural and economic resistance or an essential human value, craft’s current prominence suggests a reevaluation of the importance of artisanal practices, and a renewed emphasis on the ethical value of doing a job well.

Mark Owens
Till Wittwer
Andrew Blauvelt
The Rodina

This series of seminars aims to investigate the parameters of design as a practice. Rather than showcasing “best practices”—optimal ways for designers to take on predetermined roles—it looks at alternative models for the profession in which designers develop their own agendas and territories.

As a field, design has changed dramatically over the past few decades. While Modernist designers worked to rationalize their output in the 1950s and 60s, Postmodernism shattered that seemingly objective (yet authoritative) Modernist worldview in the 1980s and 90s. Postmodernism’s lack of agenda, alongside the democratization of production tools and the World Wide Web, allowed for the nostalgic return of Modernism as a so-called “Global Style”/“Zombie Modernism” in the early 2000s, but without early Modernism’s sense of public mission and service. Now the question is: where do we stand as design practitioners, writers, and educators in the post-digital and post-internet era? How do we redefine the role of the contemporary designer? 

Through a Glass Darkly questions notions of design practice today by considering alternative agendas for design. It showcases practices that go beyond surface, image, and form and utilize design as a tool capable of generating references and agendas outside predetermined boundaries. It introduces designers that elevate design discourse by repurposing design in the form of writing, producing, and publishing. It brings together designers who reject the status quo and seek to create their own alternative realities; designers who endeavor to remain relevant by redefining their practice and adopting positions outside traditionally defined domains.

Charles Adler
Clara Lobregat Balaguer
Jessica Charlesworth & Tim Parsons
Ezio Manzini

This series of seminars proposes to examine the diverse constraints within which designers work today and to explore ways in which designers can productively engage those constraints to define and advance their own programmes, agendas, and objectives. Much of contemporary design discourse emphasizes the power and autonomy of designers and aims to articulate the deep foundations and wide scope of their reach. Similarly, celebrated works of design are widely regarded as transformative agents that single-handedly overturn established systems and routines. From the popular reverence for “genius” designers, whether of the past or the present, to the inclusion of single works of design in museum collections, contemporary discourses of design—disciplinary as well as popular—largely foster a view of design practice that centers on the capacity of designers to see beyond existing norms and conventions, which they then radically reconfigure or even overturn through their work.

Against this view, this seminar proposes a more nuanced engagement with the systems and networks within which designers operate. The premise for this engagement is that those systems and networks constitute the only channels through which designers—and their designs—can act; as such, they serve to instantiate and transmit, even expand and multiply, the power of design. Acknowledgment of these conditions—simultaneously integral to but outside of design itself—does not diminish the authority of the designer. Instead, from this perspective, success in design is most often the product of designers effectively examining and turning to their own purposes the operations of existing systems and networks rather than working rejecting and overturning those operations altogether. “Design operations” then refers on the one hand to the maneuvers designers undertake to advance their own disciplinary ambitions and, on the other, to the workings of the social, political, economic, and technical systems and networks of power that configure the channels of design even before designers can act.

Matt Olson
Bess Williamson
Danielle Aubert

This inaugural seminar series introduces a year-long investigation into expanded forms and counter-strategies for contemporary design practice, taking its cue from genres and formats of recorded pop music. In rock and pop music, deep cuts refer to those tracks on an album which don’t fit the constraints for a commercial single. A deep cut doesn’t enter mainstream radio rotation, but is rather an “album-oriented” form in which there is greater latitude for experiment and duration.