A School for Design Fiction

James Langdon

• 01 april 2014
• 9783944669274

Samenvatting:

What if the primary function of design wasn t to build beautiful or functional
objects, but simply to tell a convincing story? The design fiction movement
assumes that every artifact has the potential to express the character of the
culture that produced it. It was in that vein that British designer James Langdon
convened a school for design fiction in November 2013 at the Gallery for
Contemporary Art, Leipzig. This accompanying catalog documents and expands
on the founding of that school (in fact, an experimental exhibition) through a
series of imagined scenarios centered around objects: a drama at the printer for
architect Augustus Pugin in 1836, the history of the universe as observed on an
English hillside in 1937, the first human trial of split brain surgery in California
in 1961 and a Scottish speech synthesis studio in 2013.