lecturesHAA is pleased to announce the second event in its 2011/2012 series: PROVOCATIONS: Challenging Detroit’s Design Discourse. This bi-monthly lecture series began in June and will continue through the end of 2012. Each panel discussion will invite local, regional, and national figures to discuss what makes Detroit provocative. Set in a variety of under-utilized, contested, and historically charged spaces throughout our city, each event seeks to challenge the participants through candid discourse and direct engagement of the built environment. It is the aim of each panel discussion to explore new urban strategies that promote social equity and advocacy. We believe good design (and good design discourse) is a proactive and critical act, toeing the line between conflict and resolution. While each event exists for only a moment, the entire series will provide a lasting catalogue of constructive dialogue, informing Detroit’s shared creative consciousness.
Event 02 MOTIVATIONS: Design Instigators. In today’s trying economic and political climate it is often difficult to continuously produce thoughtful, provocative, and engaging design. Particularly in Detroit, which can be an equally frustrating and rewarding design environment, it is easy to question one’s creative motives. Yet as challenges mount, we have an opportunity to redefine our personal and civic means and methods, to refocus on why these creative initiatives have an even more important role to play.
For this discussion we ask our panelists to give us their motives, their reasons, and their hidden agendas as a way to foreground what inspires them to do what they do. We will focus on process over product, looking at the ways design can incite change through multiple trajectories. These are individuals who have, in one way or another, become catalysts for productive change in their communities and their City. Ultimately, we hope to uncover what their collective motives say about Detroit, its unique challenges, and how the City serves as a critical motivator for substantive dialogue within the City and beyond. (more…)
