DesignInquiry

DesignInquiry is a non-profit educational organization that contributes to the interdisciplinary discourse of design through intensive team-based gatherings that generate new work and ideas around a single theme or topic. These are introduced to the design community through a widely distributed call for participation known as "words on the topic." Recent topics have included: fail again, joy, make/do, fast forward, and station. Every gathering is devoted to researching design issues on a chosen topic through lectures, presentations, workshops, and discussions and every gathering participant contributes to and is responsible for the form, content, and quality of the gathering. This includes breakfast, lunch, and dinner, as participants take turns planning, preparing, cooking and cleaning every meal. Rather than a pre-ordained program of events, DesignInquiry gatherings are organized around a moving target document known as "not-the-schedule." With a flat hierarchy structure, and a philosophy of creative collaboration, DesignInquiry is a deliberate alternative to a typical design conference. Matt Soar notes this distinction in a his critique of critiques of design and the academy. Instead of hundreds of people sitting in a darkened room passively listening to a presentation, DesignInquiry gathers two dozen people to actively engage in a conversation. Bobby Cambpell has described the structure of a DesignInquiry event as "a measured maelstrom of ideas, images, and inspirations." On Shared-Practice, Morgan Walsh reflected on her participation in >>FastForward>> but found it "impossible" to define DesignInquiry: "It's not a conference; but it's not an anti-conference, either. It's not a think tank or a residency. Though it seems unfair to call DI a camp, because it's not, for me it conjures similar feelings of wonder, adventure and nostalgia."
In 2013, Steven McCarthy included DesignInquiry in The Designer as Author, Producer, Activist, Entrepreneur, Curator & Collaborator, a survey of new forms of design authorship. Describing DesignInquiry "an alternative model for design community-building," McCarthy characterized it as "immersive, collaborative, egalitarian, topical, experimental, and...intellectually rigorous."
After every gathering, DesignInquiry distributes the gathering's findings, known as "immediate outcomes," through exhibitions, books, pamphlets, presentations, videos, and social media produced and distributed by DesignInquiry and, importantly, also by an extended network of DesignInquirers, all of whom have participants in DI programs. The goal is to "bind the outcomes into a free-to-download boost of information," intended to "inspire and inform" a wide cross-section of the design community. Pass·Port (Lulu 2007) is a collection of essays that consider the social, cultural, and design dimensions of identity in the information age ranging from an exploration of ambiguity in sexual identity to a meditation on the importance of place in the formation of self to a filmography of identities stolen, forgotten or temporarily misplaced. Je me souviens (July 2011) was an installation at Concordia University in Montréal that took place as part of the city wide Portes Ouvertes (open house) held in conjunction with UNESCO's City of Design program. The exhibition included the work of seven artists who spent a week in the city exploring and questioning the intersections of urbanism and design they discovered. Also in 2011, the "Make/Do" installation at the Five Elements Gallery in Vinalhaven, Maine, showcased work that came out of a series of workshops that examined chance and improvisation in the realm of design. Writing about this installation in Eye Magazine, Peter Hall noted the theme's relevance to everyday practice: "making do is a close friend of the impossibly tight deadline." In 2013, these outcomes were published as a Make/Do book, designed by Maia Wright and edited by Gabrielle Esperdy. Make/Do, the book, has been selected for several international art book fairs, including those in Barcelona and Mexico City. After the 2013 STATION gathering, Brooke Chornyak and Matt Spahr published the results of their ongoing global research on food preparation and collaboration as Kitchen as Station. resulted in a Twitter-based collaboration between Steven Bowden and Peter Hall that was featured in the "Design in Flux" exhibition at Crane Art as part of DesignPhiladelphia in 2014. Writing on Knight Arts, Chip Schwartz called the work coming out of the collaboration "explorations of authenticity and legibility."
Since its founding, DesignInquiry gatherings and events have taken place in Portland and Vinalhaven, Maine; Marfa, Texas; New York City, Los Angeles, Detroit; Montréal, Canada; and Berlin, Germany. DesignInquirers, as participants are called, come from the disciplines of graphic design, industrial design, digital design, architecture, planning, art, music, photography, philosophy, and poetry (among many others). They include a diverse range of practitioners and professionals, theorists and critics, and thinkers and makers of every stripe. To date, nearly three hundred creative people have participated in DesignInquiry gatherings. DesignInquiry's topics and gatherings, and the work they have stimulated have appeared with increasing regularity in such publications as Design Observer, Core 77, Eye Magazine, and the Portland Phoenix and in a variety of design forums, including the annual meetings of the American Institute of Graphic Arts and the College Art Association. At CAA, Joshua Singer and Christopher Moore presented Towards an Open Model of Design Research, using two of DesignInquiry's DesignCities gatherings as case studies for investigating "a prototypical model for collective and embodied approaches to research." DesignInquirers, including past and present board members and collaborators, are active contributors to contemporary design discourse, both individually and as representatives of DesignInquiry. DI founder Peter Hall, led the panel discussion Rethinking Design Education with Denise Gonzales Crisp as a participant.
During the fall of 2014, DesignInquiry participated in Machine Project's residency at the Gamble House in Pasadena. DI's contribution to the Machine Project Field Guide to the Gamble House was called "Drawing with Ghosts" and consisted of a series of ghost drawing and writing experiments that attempted to make the metaphysical material through interactive channeling of the spirits in the attic. Also in Fall/Winter 2014, DesignInquiry installed ongoing work coming out of the gathering as part of a residency at DEPE Space at Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. This work includes exhibitions, installations, and workshops that use Detroit as data and design.

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