I have been thinking back to Design Engaged in Montréal in the first days of October 2008. I had stumbled across a collection of photos I took from the event on my old flickr account. They bring back a particular atmosphere and time and excitement about what was possible. There was a particular charge to the gathering, at least I felt that.
When I went, Design Engaged had enough structure to give people a common place and enough looseness for the people present to alter the programme as they worked. There were presentations, conversations, meals, little city side-trip field excursions.
What I remember most is the density of creative and industrious imagination assembled there. It was remarkable. People arrived with their own projects and long-running questions: design, media, urban life, technology, research, play, the texture of everyday experience. We were not being asked to agree on a future. Everyone lent their attention, references, and bountiful encouragement to everyone else’s attempts to make something imaginable. Someone’s half-formed proposition could become more legible because another person recognized a parallel, supplied a story, or carried the question into a different field. Everyone contributed, if memory serves. By that I mean we all presented something and all of the things reflected a kind of collective acknowledgment that there was work to be done, or ways of engaging with the world — commercially, creatively, analytically, and so forth — that had yet to be explored.
That capacity for mutual support is easy to sentimentalize after the fact, as in now. The gathering made a temporary public for all kinds of work or ways of working that did not fit neatly into one discipline or institution. We were given time to speak and do so in unfinished form and then to meet others whose commitments to listening and learning might sharpen, complicate, or sustain what was shared.
One aspect I wish had been different was the ongoing cohesion of the group. That did not maintain. People made remarkable work, founded studios and schools, wrote, taught, exhibited, built organizations, and found new collaborators — and organizations. The particular assembly did not return often enough to become an ongoing practice or “school”. I feel that absence as a loss: such a group with rare imaginative range briefly shared a place and a tempo, then dispersed. Today it’s hard to get anyone’s attention who was there. You arrange a time to catch up and they’ll shuttle you to their EA, and I feel a bit embarrassed, I suppose both for me and for them.
I guess that’s on my mind as I follow a bit of what Carl has been sharing about Black Mountain College. He and I have been wondering and imagining what a modern version of such a gathering might be today. The question is not how to reproduce 2008 today, really. The circumstances, tools, pressures, people’s roles and situations, and public stakes — these have all changed. The question persists though: how to create conditions in which people with serious commitments can make one another’s work more possible over time.
A sustaining event would need a stated remit: to advance forms of attention and responsibility that make a more habitable world imaginable and practicable. It would need to draw together artists, designers, writers, researchers, organizers, engineers, educators, and people whose knowledge comes from places these categories miss. The invitation would ask each participant to arrive with a live question, a project, an artifact, a difficulty, or a piece of work that can be shared. The programme would protect unstructured time, field work, meals, and small groups alongside the more formal sessions.
Such a thing would also need a life beyond its first convening. A host group could return to the participants’ work, commission small collaborations, maintain a common archive, and convene again with enough regularity for the relationships to deepen. The value would be in the continuity of attention: people recognizing one another’s questions across years, encountering the work in its changing forms, and finding occasions to contribute.
By consciousness, I mean the habits by when we turn our attention: noticing whose futures are being described, which materials and systems a proposal depends on, who has to carry the weight of those futures, what kinds of repair remain available, and where imagination has been diminished or crushed by habit or fear. Those habits grow through contact with other people’s work and through the care taken to keep that contact alive.
By the way, I’m so glad I took all these photos.
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