Welcome!

Designing Economic Cultures is a research project that sets out to investigate the relationship between socio-economic precarity and the production of socially and politically engaged design projects.

The fundamental question the project poses is:
how can designers, who through their work want to question and challenge the prevalent economic system, gain a satisfying degree of social and economic security without having to submit themselves to the commercial pressures of the market?  Read more ›

Construction site for non-affirmative practice

Constructive Dismantling

My Castle Is Your Castle

Introduction

More open spaces are needed, where there is a critical dismantling of the dominant culture, but coming from multiple perspectives and open dialogue, not a different kind of fixed ideology.

Brett Bloom / Temporary Services

During our residency at A-I-R Laboratory, CSW Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, between April and July 2011 we organised a series of four seminars that explored the topics of DIY culture & autonomy, people’s relation to time, food economy and public space in Poland. We were especially interested in finding out about the changes that happened in these fields after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989. While discussing the different topics with the guest speakers we invited, the main focus of the series was slightly widened. Also, we wanted to share and discuss the knowledge produced by this research with others. Therefore, we invited art and design students from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Art to join the seminar series.

9 May 2011
The relation to public space in Poland, with Piotr Juskowiak (human geographer) and Jakub Szczesny (architect)

21 June 2011
DIY culture and autonomy in the everyday, with Adrian Zandberg (sociologist) and Slawomir Budaj (DIY furniture maker)

4 July 2011
DIY cultural practices in Moldova before and after 1989, with Teodor Ajder (artist and writer)

11 July 2011
Beat capitalism with a carrot – the Warsaw Food Cooperative, with Tomek Sikora (activist, freegan, founding member of the cooperative)