Barking from Without was part of the 2010 Cities Methodologies exhibition and conference organised by the UCL Urban Lab. The exhibition took place at the Slade Research Centre on Woburn Square from 5 to 7 May 2010.

Barking from Without is an interactive installation presenting material from an ongoing case study of the new Barking Town Square in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham. Part of a broader research project on design in the contemporary public realm, the case study is supported primarily by participant-observer methods that draw as much on ethnographic fieldwork as on Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism. The research is presented in the form of an open dialogue which visitors are encouraged to join by leaving written comments.

All material from the installation is posted on barking-assemblage.org under the category Barking from Without. Comments are still very much welcome! Please participate by sending your comments to comment@barking-assemblage.org

Art historian Giulio Carlo Argan formulated his famous sentence in the nineteen-seventies, when then the modernist grand narrative of “good design” had already long disintegrated, leaving something of a semantic vacuum in the designed object, an empty space that had been promptly occupied by a micro-narrative of immediate satisfaction by indiscriminate consumption. Looking at the ease with which designed objects can be used to carry extremely different meanings and values forces us to reflect on the communicative power of design and its information value. Forms generated by design represent a presence in space that doesn’t end in the fulfillment of its function, but continues in force of their mere existence, in their relationship with the rest of the environment.

“Critical minds: critical spaces” is a one-day symposium organized by a group of UCL research students gravitating around this blog, as Gabriele Oropallo and Wesley Albrecht. The event is conceived of as an occasion to look at the work of architects, planners and designers and its social and cultural relevance in stimulating awareness and criticism of the contemporary. Very often, at the heart of cultural production, there is a practice shaped by a rational or existential response to material, technical or cultural constraints. This practice generates products that are designed as tools to enable the rest of the community to critically understand and question messages, objects and environments, rather than taking them for granted. The colloquium will feature some presentations on current research in design theory and history and on recent design projects. A final panel discussion will follow, with Justin McGuirk, editor of the Icon magazine, and Mark Cousins (Architectural Association, London Consortium). The event also marks the closing of CitiesMethodologies, an interdisciplinary event on innovative methodologies across the arts and humanities at the Slade Research Centre (Woburn Square, 5-7 May 2010). Speakers include Mark Cousins (Architectural Association), Annelys de Vet (Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam), James Auger (Royal College of Art), Jimmy Loizeau (Goldsmiths), Teresa Stoppani (University of Greenwich), Eyal Weizman (Goldsmiths), Jonathan Hill (Bartlett School of Architecture).

The colloquium will be followed by a wine reception in the Wilkins Building Haldane Room. Participation is free and open to all (for information email: g.oropallo@ucl.ac.uk, wesleyaelbrecht@gmail.com). Critical minds: critical spaces is supported by the UCL Grand Challenge of Intercultural Interaction, the Graduate School Research Project Fund and the Department of Italian Studies.

A man scrambles up the wall of a derelict watchtower in the middle of a military camp wearing a wading waistcoat and carrying a tripod. He’s a ornithologist, and he goes to the abandoned Israeli military base of Oush Grab (Beit Sahour, Bethlehem region) to study birds migrating from Turkey to Egypt through Palestine. Since the military left the base, the birds have started using the base as a stopover point, temporarily inhabiting the structures left behind season after season. The military camp was established by the British during the Mandate on Palestine, after the First World War, and has since been used, in turn, by the Jordanians and the Israelis. The space had been congealed for decades into the shape of a walled up instrument of control, that had a crucial influence of the life of people who lived next to it, however off-limits it was for them. Today, the site is the theatre for a chess game between the settlers, who want to found a new town there, the army that supports them, the international activists and the NGO’s that try to stop them and the Beit Sahour municipality that tries to make it into a public park.
Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal were inspired by the work of the ornithologist and the spontaneous practice of the birds. The artists/architects founded a few years ago in Bethlehem an architectural collective aimed at investigating security/control devices and engaging with the spatial realities of the Israeli-Palestinian in a propositional manner. The collective came up with a proposal that doesn’t aim at re-articulating and thus doing reiterating the function of the site, but at profaning it. The goal of their proposal is to release the energies harnessed when establishing and maintaining the site of control, and at the same time encourage both the birds in their seasonal return and nature in its slow process of dismantling of the man-made structures. This threefold programme is behind the idea of piercing all the walls of the buildings to provide a myriad inlets for the birds and let the buildings happily crumble down – not to be “lost”, but to be “regained”.

Text © Gabriele Oropallo, 2009. Photos © Nina Kolowratnik, Alessandro Petti, 2009.

On-site at ExperimentaDesign, DESIGN ACT invites you to a discussion about socially and politically engaged design.Visit and contribute to: a seminar featuring Swedish practitioners discussing historical and contemporary projects; live interviews during the opening week, and; an installation featuring a participatory archive of project examples where you can collect information and print your own publication. The installed and online archive of DESIGN ACT will be continually updated with media and materials produced from these activities.

How can design materialize ideas that can lead to wider change? Can design reform – or contest – social and political conditions? Where does this take place – in the design studio or on the factory floor, in exhibition settings or on the streets? What are the emerging tactics, outcomes and audiences for such forms of practice?

The DESIGN ACT seminar explores critical roles for designers in society. In Sweden, architecture, fashion and design have historically participated in constructing the ideals – and forms – of the welfare state. Today, practitioners continue to engage in social and societal issues, whether materializing a critique of the status quo, proposing alternatives to reform systems and spaces, or staging participatory design processes and public debates. While too often reduced to questions of form and function, such tendencies expose powerful and political forms of design practice.

Featuring a series of presentations from Swedish designers and a panel session with international guests, the DESIGN ACT seminar at ExperimentaDesign reflects on historical precedents and discusses examples of contemporary practice. Presentations by: Helena Mattsson, on Swedish welfare politics, critique and design; Ana Betancour, on architecture as catalyst for social change; Otto von Busch, on hactivism and participation in fashion design; Tor Lindstrand, on architecture and performance for staging new social interactions.

In the panel session following the presentations, the presenters, international guests and the audience take up the seminar theme in relation to issues in other contexts, disciplines and parts of the world – and, together, reflect on future directions for design.

The Venue will take place in: EXD’09 Lounging Space, Palácio Braamcamp, Pátio do Tijolo 25, Lisbon, Portugal. For details and updates on the participants and program: http://www.design-act.se

Installation: 9 September – 8 November

Live interviews: 10 September, 12AM – 8PM

Seminar: Friday 11 September, 2.30 – 8 PM