DesignInquiry 2013 Program STATION

DesignInquiry is in the planning stages for its Vinalhaven topic, STATION.

STATION: pause, ponder, play : What are the “stations” of our work, interactions, and play? When our networks are not only local but also regional, global, and frequently “virtual,” where is activity situated? Do we yearn for both fixity of place and transitory freedom? What are the tensions, if any, between these extremes? The more that mobility is privileged, does place matter less? How might stations—their locations, design, histories, and potential—benefit and/or hamper relationships and professional practices?

DesignInquiry considers the “place” of life and work—the stops, or nodes, perhaps, within living networks that are sometimes fixed, but that are also, more and more, variable. We are served by work stations, train stations, radio stations, gas stations, and server stations. We occupy these places somewhere between the extremes of permanence and impermanence, between rootedness and nomadism.

Work life, to say nothing of social life, is increasingly portable, interdisciplinary, linked, and multi-faceted. How is our sense of place shifting from the office or studio or home to the stations in between? How is this state of “multi-settlement” refiguring our alliance to, for instance, the studio—that long-established hub of creativity in design—or the place of business, or the place of social connection?

Where is production situated today, and where might it reside in the future? Are there places of work and production that we still regard as sacred, or at least exclusively reserved for certain purposes?  Nodes where things gather, and through which energies flow? What part of actual place is ceremonial, over and above functional? Do these parts constitute a building or a gathering? Are they fixed or transient? Are stations places of production or places where one pauses amidst production? What effect do these places have on advancing and realizing ideas?

Join DesignInquiry in Vinalhaven, Maine to consider the dimensions of STATION, as we spend a week in June making the island a hub of diverse creative networks and a productive junction of thinking and making.

STATION: Pause, Ponder, Play
Vinalhaven 2013
JUNE 23-29, 2013

I didn’t take part very much in the discussion around the urgent and timely topic this year, but station intersects so nicely with what I’m thinking about with the mobile art house replicas. I am pretty excited about my proposal, to go on a field trip with the group and make miniaturized replicas of the Poor Farm. The idea is to investigate what people select as critical in the process of miniaturizing. Once we get there, all the plans we make ahead of time can change; this is what is most interesting to me about the fluid hierarchy. Somehow it always works out.