“Different by Design” – that was an advertising slogan for the Studebaker automobile in the 1960s. Today, the phrase is turned differently: what differences can design create? “Can design change society?” asked a recent issue of Arch+ magazine (2016), for example.
The film 100% Dakar (2014, directed by Sandra Krampelhuber), which deals with the young culture and design scene in Senegal as well as re-migration in Dakar, was the starting point for a research trip to Dakar in 2016 to re-evaluate the situation in exchange with central scene actors. The guiding questions for us were the reasons that contribute to re-migration and the specific role of design options in this process.
We would like to complement the presentation of our research results with an analysis of the current campaign design of migration twisting, as can be observed with the Ghanaian fundraising campaign “Help America!” by Fokn Bois in Ghana is the Future (2014: R: Thomas Burkhalter) and currently, for example, with the emigration campaign “RescEU/Save the People” by the Hamburg studio yvjo (alumni of the Media Design study program, DHBW Ravensburg) or the works of Rusty Radiator. In each case, the aim is to use the creative means of campaigning to bring about critical changes in perception, evaluation, and consciousness with regard to migration movements, and to generate differences and differentiations.
The theoretical foil for our considerations is a critical examination of design-theoretical currents such as social design, transformation design and design thinking, which are currently being increasingly discussed in the context of problem and crisis management, based on transcultural and postcolonial theories.
The Play Session was developed as a contribution to the conference “Design Dispersed. Forms of Migration and Flight” at LMU Munich, February 09-11, 2017: www.kunstgeschichte.uni-muenchen.de/veranstaltungen/design-dispersed-cfp/index.html
See also the publication by Cornelia Lund on rusty stereotypes and fake charity campaigns: http://www.fluctuating-images.de/rusty-stereotypes-fake-charity-campaigns/
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