Dear friends,
Tonight The Gopher Hole hosts Design Futures, a debate hosted by Maurice Barnwell to mark the launch of his book Design, Creativity and Culture: an orientation to design.
The doors open at 6.30pm, the event is free and all are welcome.
Presenting their positions on Design Futures alongside Maurice will be the Chartered Society of Designers representative Theo Paradise-Hirst and young design collective We Colonised the Moon
About Design Creativity and Culture
Design, Creativity and Culture: an orientation to design, provides an inclusive, cross cultural study of design that is intended to provoke readers to question the role of design in the emerging cultural context. Today, new challenges are emerging as nations position themselves to respond to the forces of economic modernisation. Design can no longer pander to flirtatious fashion or egocentric attitudes. Time to reassess. Time for a collaborative approach that involves users in a cross-disciplinary process. Barnwell will highlight four major challenges and three threats to the practice of design over the next decade. He will present one possible solution that incorporates elements that influence the design process, suggesting a reorientation to design as the way forward. As the White Queen said, it is indeed a time to believe impossible things.
About We Colonised The Moon: Sue Corke + Hagen Betzwieser
Hagen Betzwieser's artistic practice is exploring the gaps and connections between art and science to create New New Media.
Susan Corke is an artist with a particular interest in investigating the role of the audience as a participatory factor in a theatrical type of viewing experience and how this form of interaction may be extended into supposedly passive art forms including illustration. For six weeks in August and September 2011 they set up a laboratory at the ACME Project Space in Bethnal Green, London. The concept was designed around the sketching and rapid prototyping in both, 2D and 3D of a number of new concepts for future works and commissions. Asking questions about how space might smell, sound and look like and redesigning the future of space transportation.
About The Chartered Society of Designers
The Chartered Society of Designers (CSD) is the professional body for designers and the authority on professional design practice. It is the world's largest chartered body of professional designers with members in 33 countries and is unique in representing designers in all disciplines. The Society exists to promote concern for the sound principles of design in all areas in which design considerations apply, to further design practice and encourage the study of design techniques for the benefit of the community. In so doing, it seeks to secure and promote a professional body of designers and regulate and control their practice for the benefit of industry and the public.
About The Gopher Hole
The Gopher Hole is a new architecture, art, music, design, literature & miscellaneous culture gallery/venue in London. A collaboration between aberrant architecture and Beatrice Galilee, our agenda is to explore new ways of curating ideas in popular culture and to provide a forum for critical debate on the arts and society. The Gopher Hole is planning a rolling programme of exhibitions, events, talks and screenings that we hope will provide an open house for ideas that cross cultural boundaries, promote political and sociological thinking and encourage debate and exchange between disciplines.
The Gopher Hole is part of El Paso, a bar, workplace and diner located in Shoreditch in East London run by Ossie Mustafa. El Paso is a city directly located on the US / Mexico border and a Gopher Hole is US military slang for the spontaneous, self made smuggling tunnels that are used to move and distribute illicit materials beneath this type of fortified international boundary. The temporary, small-scale incursions often tap into existing infrastructure and only exist for a few weeks / months before being discovered or collapsing back into themselves. In the same vein, The Gopher Hole aims to scratch below the surface of popular culture, investigating subject matter that often lies just below the radar. Working with established as well as emerging artists, architects, writers and designers, each exhibition will cross disciplinary boundaries before rapidly disappearing, then re-emerging in new forms elsewhere.
The Gopher Hole
350-354 Old Street
London EC1V 9NQ
www.the-gopher-hole.com
