In times of accelerated change, to what flag do you pledge allegiance?
When Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon, as a way of marking the territory he put a flag on it. After all, it’s human nature to fight for power by creating compelling spectacles, to impose dominance by using symbols as an extension of our thought and vision. We will never know if that spectacle was...
Disco, Donna & Donna
Disco is not merely a genre of dance music, but a complex subculture holding progressive political beliefs. Alongside it’s glittering clothes and sexy moves, disco came to rise in the United States in the 1970s, evolving from the well-known international sounds of Motown, rooted in New York and...
Chimera: the Reality of a Myth
There is a Greek myth that details a creature, or rather, a beast that had the body of a lion with the head of a goat jutting from its back and a serpent’s tail. In the Iliad, Homer described it as “a thing of immoral make, not human.” The creature named Chimera was feared for its hybrid body that...
Form and System – money as design
In 2008, somewhere in the National Bank of Denmark in Copenhagen, the seal on two steel boxes was broken. The contents made up an antiquated crisis package from the Cold War contingency plan, including all the necessary equipment for the production of special emergency money....
Financial and Speculative Design in The Age of Machines
Financial crises are temporal crises. They are created in mechanical circuits by new technologies acting so fast that we cannot perceive them until the damage is done. The speculative design can help us understand the crises by making them visible and in this way open up the future that the mechanic...
Complementary Currency Design Through Debt
Community currencies are based upon cohesion between their members and often aim to circumvent issues related to a lack of monetary supply, particularly within more marginalized populations. Based on trust and an aim to secure the local economy, it can be said that these currencies re-frame money as...
Fit for Finance
Something seemed deadly about the »sardonic funeral towers of metropolitan finance«. In 1938, when Lewis Mumford was looking for the possibilities of creating form under the conditions of his time, what concerned him was the »fatal lack of connection between architecture and the dominant social s...
The Promise of the Creative Industries, Design Work and Livelihoods
In neoliberal times design has become an instrument of economic policy and commercial opportunity, more generally. This is in both its basic role in creating and controlling assets through intellectual property rights, and in its symbolic role as a leading innovator in the transformation of labour...
An Anticipated Pandemic & Post-Covid Design Economies
In an ideal world, designers would create ways of living to meet human needs and desires without undermining the climate system and contributing to the sixth extinction event. In the political system we inherited, designers work within an economic context that harnesses our skills to reproduce unsus...