This is a recording of a lecture for the Department of Design at Goldsmiths, University of London, presenting a design framework developed to explore the discursive practices of design within educational settings. Special thanks to Tim Miller for the invitation.
Abstract:
Imagine, if you will, a world where the narratives we tell ourselves are not truths etched in the firmament but fabrications—fragile, deliberate, and often cruel. Critical fables are a design practice that lays bare these fabrications, exposing the fragile and constructed nature of the realities we inhabit.
Critical fables use the crafted object, the tangible story, to unravel entrenched assumptions and challenge the arbitrary foundations of what we take for granted. They speak through materiality, insisting that the act of making is itself an act of rethinking. In each artefact lies not only a critique but a confrontation with power, with history, and with possibility.
What emerges is not escape but engagement: the slow, deliberate work of reshaping—not just the future, but the present, here and now. These fables do not seek to escape the world; they aim to reconfigure it, to reassemble its pieces into forms that hold hope, resistance, and possibility. And so, they ask us, the makers and the dreamers: what will you craft from the stories you have inherited?
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This is a recording of a lecture for the Department of Design at Goldsmiths, University of London, presenting a design framework developed to explore the discursive practices of design within educational settings. Special thanks to Tim Miller for the invitation.
Abstract:
Imagine, if you will, a world where the narratives we tell ourselves are not truths etched in the firmament but fabrications—fragile, deliberate, and often cruel. Critical fables are a design practice that lays bare these fabrications, exposing the fragile and constructed nature of the realities we inhabit.
Critical fables use the crafted object, the tangible story, to unravel entrenched assumptions and challenge the arbitrary foundations of what we take for granted. They speak through materiality, insisting that the act of making is itself an act of rethinking. In each artefact lies not only a critique but a confrontation with power, with history, and with possibility.
What emerges is not escape but engagement: the slow, deliberate work of reshaping—not just the future, but the present, here and now. These fables do not seek to escape the world; they aim to reconfigure it, to reassemble its pieces into forms that hold hope, resistance, and possibility. And so, they ask us, the makers and the dreamers: what will you craft from the stories you have inherited?
Live #22 - Alchemy Of Ruins - ft. MAID at CSM's Studio Theatre
Very Very Far Away
43 minutes 1 second
11 months ago
Live #22 - Alchemy Of Ruins - ft. MAID at CSM's Studio Theatre
In this episode—Alchemy of Ruins—we bring you into a moment of transformation: a live recording of a performance by first-year students of the MA Industrial Design course at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.
For their first unit, the students responded to a text—a fictional fragment from another time and place, rich with peculiar detail.
From this fragment, they conjured life from its ruins. They designed and crafted objects and sounds that might hold meaning in this imagined world, weaving rituals that reconstruct time and space.
What you hear is not a narrative in the traditional sense, but the objects themselves speaking—mediators of their own stories. This is a fleeting glimpse into a place both unfamiliar and profound, reaching out to us from very, very far away.
This performance features narration by Andrew Friend and is a collaboration with Central Saint Martins’ MA Industrial Design programme. The performance took place on the 11th of December 2024 at the Studio Theatre in kings cross.
Very Very Far Away
This is a recording of a lecture for the Department of Design at Goldsmiths, University of London, presenting a design framework developed to explore the discursive practices of design within educational settings. Special thanks to Tim Miller for the invitation.
Abstract:
Imagine, if you will, a world where the narratives we tell ourselves are not truths etched in the firmament but fabrications—fragile, deliberate, and often cruel. Critical fables are a design practice that lays bare these fabrications, exposing the fragile and constructed nature of the realities we inhabit.
Critical fables use the crafted object, the tangible story, to unravel entrenched assumptions and challenge the arbitrary foundations of what we take for granted. They speak through materiality, insisting that the act of making is itself an act of rethinking. In each artefact lies not only a critique but a confrontation with power, with history, and with possibility.
What emerges is not escape but engagement: the slow, deliberate work of reshaping—not just the future, but the present, here and now. These fables do not seek to escape the world; they aim to reconfigure it, to reassemble its pieces into forms that hold hope, resistance, and possibility. And so, they ask us, the makers and the dreamers: what will you craft from the stories you have inherited?
