Social + Political Infrastructures

Context can be understood in multiple ways beyond the physical. The social political and economic infrastructures of places are often invisible or marginalised by the design professions, and yet uncovering these infrastructures can reveal complex relationships between places and the way they are occupied. Techniques of consultation, participatory intervention and socially engaged design practice make close connections with the social constituencies of the site and can be seen as non-physical site surveys – necessary precursors to the creation of design strategies.

Socially engaged design practice enables the acquisition of ways of thinking and ways of communicating thought that reconceptualise the world. Because design can operate within the realm of speculation, its findings are neither right nor wrong, but concerned with possibilities and alternatives. Politically engaged design is problem seeking, it is pro-active; it chooses a set of issues and explores them from a critical, sometimes ideological perspective. The resolution and values of a project may be in the ability to articulate a question you didn’t know needed asking. Design has agency and can act as a catalyst for social and political change.

SueAnne Ware An Anti-Memorial to Heroin Over-dose Victims. 2002.

This Anti-Memorial was a temporary public event undertaken as part of the Melbourne Festival. It comprised three types of objects located in the streets of St Kilda: red text stenciled on the pavement taken from personal statements regarding the victims, planter boxes with poppies, and illuminated resin plaques attached to the planters that incorporated personal items of the victims.

The project questioned the nature and purpose of memorials, highlighting the shifting meanings of conventional symbols and practices. It subverts prevailing understandings and sentiments, for example regarding the association of poppies with patriotic remembrance of soldiers killed in battle, in order to raise social consciousness and political awareness regarding typically unquestioned decisions of appropriate memorialisation in public space.

Mel Dodd  [muf architecture / art] A Horses Tail, Tilbury, UK. 2001 – 2003

Making design proposals for a public park in Tilbury, East London, muf embarked on collaborative and open-ended research into the occupation and ownership of local space. Participation and consultation developed into something more playful and performative – into fabrication, masquerade and a parade. Posters were created to question people’ s ordinary relationship to their surrounding landscape. “Does a horse need a field?” “Does a field need a horse?”

A public gymkana becomes the precursor for the final project. The preliminary collaborative projects inaugurate the dressage arena in the new urban park, making room, literally , for the presence within an urban landscape of what is otherwise strategically suppressed.

Graham Crist [Antarctica] with Joost. Greenhouse Federation Square, Melbourne. 2000

The Greenhouse was a temporary building in Melbourne’s Federation Square designed to demonstrate a recyclable construction system, and an ecologically driven function room in the city. It was built on a tiny budget and short time program, with the room intended to operate for twelve weeks over summer, after which time it will be reconstructed and recycled. The structure is made from a custom folded super lightweight steel system holding a skin of encapsulated straw bale, form ply and a flexible clear acrylic curtain, as well as screens of wild strawberries stacked vertically in florists’ crates. It was both bar and café which, peeped out to Flinders Street, that the made the roof accessible from above.

This simple architectural gesture aimed its effect at the juxtaposition with the highly wrought geometry all around it, and from the sense that this is either a prototype for a permanent kit, or a piece of circus. It is an argument about a different set of values from Federation Square; a different idea of the city, and one that is complimentary to it. This little building embodies a position toward the `ecological’ which is ephemeral and adaptable; low tech but not crafty. It straddles the slightly tired debate between the technological and the folk. And perhaps it is a little less determined and predictable.

SueAnne Ware. SIEV X Memorial Project. 2002-

This project remembers 353 refugees who drowned in the 2001 sinking of a ‘Suspect Illegal Entry Vessel’. It seeks to raise awareness of the ongoing humanitarian crisis of refugee rights around the world, as well as the personal tragedy of those involved in this instance. The project was initiated in 2002 by Steve Biddulph, a psychologist and author, Uniting Church Minister Rob Horsfeld, and Beth Gibbings, artist and project manager. In late 2002 Dr. Ware joined them to assist in establishing an inclusive and educational design process (an ideas competition resulting in the nation-wide production of decorated timber poles representative of the victims) as well as envisage a sited physical outcome (an arrangement of the poles in Canberra’s Weston Park).

Mel Dodd [mufaus]. Kings Creek Strategy. 2009

A socially orientated project, commissioned by the local community, this strategy sought to create an action plan for incremental improvements to a creek territory strewn with rubbish, running from a housing estate to the foreshore, in the town of Hastings. Using research including workshops with local children addressing rubbish and misbehavior, the project acknowledged contested uses of the public realm, and exposed the paradox of feral ground: a typology of space which is outside of predetermined boundaries, marginal but valuable, its ecology threatened by misuse but essential as a cultural landscape.