Explore the profiles of this year’s graduating class.
Wai-kwan Crystal Chan
Activating Design Museums in Response to Design Activism
Since the last century, design has been serving the growth mentality to an extent that “has displaced the ‘invisible hand of God’” as design theorist Tony Fry put it. This magnification of design’s role prompts critical reflections for the fundamental meanings and purposes of why and how we design. “Design activism” is a term emerged in this context to articulate the urgent social roles of design. Scholars theorise it from expanding framework to specific actions: from public space pioneering to protest artefacts making, from open and participatory design methodologies to designerly intervention into everyday experience.
Design museums, having a boom since the eighties in the North which continuing to these days to other parts of the world, are distant stakeholders in the design activism discourse. Their connection with the industry and position of shaping the public’s understanding of design, however, place them in a strategic spot. What roles can they take to respond to design’s social call with the reflection on the knowledge production of our time?
Drawing theories and discourses from design history, design studies and museum studies with a case study of MAK Vienna (Austrian Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art), my research aims to explore the challenges that design activism brings to these institutions and to discuss the latter’s potential roles. With insights from the discourses of contemporary art museums, my dissertation attempts to argue for "the temple of the Muses" towards an activism for itself and the public.
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