Advanced Resilient Practices: Demythologizing design heritage

Abstract

This paper presents an international research, exhibition and forum project that has been developing since 2016. The project aims to demythologize design’s consumerist Utopias and sectoral hierarchies as a series of temporary artistic and design interventions. By socio-historical analysis of politics of design, the project involves blurring the borders between exhibition, archival display, and action research. This involves pushing forward Pratt’s “contact zone” as a technological site of embodied advanced practice of design critique together with the exercise of dissent foregrounding ecology of practices. The present paper focuses on the project’s methods and research outcome concerning the case of Finnish design and its post-war mythologization. With a method of revealing the precise emergence of sectoral myths, the project represents how consumers and designers who foster modes of resistance to ruling privileges and hierarchies, can be provided with care.