Closing Remarks - Lingua Franca

Описание: The fifth annual conference organized by, and starring, graduating students of the SVA MFA in Design Criticism, took place on Friday, May 2, 2014 at the SVA Theatre in New York City. This year’s conference, "Lingua Franca," was moderated by British architecture critic and curator Justin McGuirk who provided simultaneous translation among topics and ideas, between the D-Crit Class of 2014 and a headlining roster of keynote speakers who represent our interests in curation, literature, theory, and design futures. We were proud to announce a strong line up of guest speakers this year: author and critic Nicholson Baker; curator of Design and Architecture at Hong Kong’s new museum M+ Aric Chen; critic, material anthropologist Emily Stokes-Rees; and creator of the MIT Press Mediawork project Peter Lunenfeld. Graduating students presented their research on such topics as: the branding of emergent nation South Sudan; the need for a more locally sensitive approach to design education in the Gulf region; the problematic of the human body as a site for critical design interventions; the rise of micro-living in twenty-first century urban planning; and the ways in which the visual tropes of Californian surfing are being re-mythologized a new east-coast urban context. Here at the Department of Design Research, Writing and Criticism we want to reach as broad an audience as possible for our investigations into design, its contexts, and consequences. A perpetual, and yet engaging, challenge is to find a language and a way of talking about design that makes sense to regular people whose “mother tongue” may not be design-ese; but without flattening out our deep research or rounding the edges of our distinctively accented perspectives. Our ongoing work then, heightened in this period of media upheaval, is to re-imagine evermore effective ways to communicate our findings and arguments to the people that they concern. We find in design criticism the potential for a “lingua franca” that would allow not only the freer trade of ideas and methods between disciplines, but also a means for more thoughtful public debate about design and its repercussions.