Proposals for 2019 Design Canberra Festival

DESIGN Canberra 2019: Utopia

4-24 November 2019

DESIGN Canberra is calling for projects for the 2019 festival that celebrate and promote Canberra as a living design laboratory, a global city of design.

DESIGN Canberra has resonated with ever-increasing audiences near and far because design is in our city’s DNA. DESIGN Canberra is a powerful platform to promote design and the work of designers. Presented annually since 2014, DESIGN Canberra has grown to embrace a regional and global focus, becoming a critical and collaborative forum for contemporary, relevant, experimental and authentic design.

DESIGN Canberra is also the ACT’s fastest growing festival. 2018 was an amazing year of growth, inspiration, excellence and engagement – a result of creative collaborations and strategic partnerships with Canberra’s craft and design sector and the broader community. In 2018, over 112,000 people engaged with the festival’s curated program of exhibitions, talks, tours, collaborations, open homes and artist studios, activations and markets showcasing the best in design.

Utopia

Design is a powerful tool to build a better world and imagine a perfect future. Utopia is an opportunity to reimagine the past, build a more creative and inclusive present, and boldly experiment with the future of design.

• Celebrate the Bauhaus’ 100th anniversary which brought together craft, skill and innovation and had a distinct impact on Canberra’s built environment and creative community.
• Take seriously design’s responsibility as an agent for positive change in society
• Challenge ideals of perfection
• Make visible design and designers to new audiences.

There are many ways to get involved in DESIGN Canberra 2019. We are currently calling out for General Submissions, Artist Open Studios, Living Rooms and Exhibition Listings. Submissions close 4 March 2019.

More information on submitting a paper for the conference.

Call for papers: Fielding Architecture: Feminist Practices for a Decolonised Pedagogy

IV International Symposium on Architecture and Gender organised by Catalina Mejía Moreno (University of Brighton) and Emma Cheatle (University of Sheffield) ​

To be held at: University of Brighton, 24th-25th June 2019

We invite you to present at the Fielding Architecture: Feminist Practices for a Decolonised Pedagogy in June 2019.

This interdisciplinary symposium proposes to explore and question the practice of teaching architectural history / theory primarily focused in the UK context though welcoming a debate through dialogues with other contexts from a feminist and critical perspective, askng: how is it constructed, from which positions, and from where its content derives; how can its construction be critiqued and informed by other disciplines such as feminist geographies, environmental psychology, cultural studies, technology and science studies, queer theory and urban geography amongst others; and, moreover, how should architectural histories and theories be constructed in the future. We will situate ourselves at the boundary: looking both inside at the fundamentals of architecture; and looking outside at the expanded field, yet always maintaining a critical gendered perspective.

The symposium will focus on four areas:

1. Critiques: What constitutes the canon of architecture (the rules, frameworks, habits, practices, contents). How is this an effective architectural knowledge base? How can this be criticised? What does the criticism in itself constitute as a method or framework? What questions can/should be formed here on decolonisation?
2. Contents: Addressing the sites of architectural knowledge, we work towards creating a broader body of knowledge inclusive of gender, class and race, and one that flexes and bends, grows rather than calcifies and sets limits. How can we translate across contexts? Here we also call for papers that even problematise the idea of architecture itself, as a set of neutral normative, westernised and gendered ideologies and values.
3. Modes and sites of writing and research: Focusing on the institutional sites and frameworks in which architectural knowledge is produced and constrained, we reconsider writing and researching as spaces of action, production and contestation. How can we critique, challenge and re-propose modes of writing and dissemination?
4. Modes and sites of teaching: Engaging with modes of architectural exploration in pedagogical settings – from the lecture theatre, the seminar, to the tutorial, to the online rubric – how can these re-evaluate the relationships between content and knowledge as well as of ethics and care? How can we develop and scope the invention and application of new methods of teaching and writing that reflect this?

More information on submitting a paper for the conference.