The year is 2018
•
This second issue of Positioning Practice presented (Re)distributed Media: Leakage – a set of four collaborative workshops devised by the MA Graphic Media Design (MAGMD) course, that took place at London College of Communication
@lcclondon from January-March 2018 and later extended to formulate a weekend long public programme for the Hope to Nope: Graphics & Politics 2008-2018 exhibition at the Design Museum, London
@designmuseum June 2018.
How do we navigate increasingly polluted information-scapes? Who are the gate-keepers of news, opinion, policy and why? How can we challenge the distribution of information from positions of power? These questions and many more emerged from a very present concern about the manner in which information is designed and distributed through media platforms and technologies for an increasingly contingent public. In particular, we were interested in how design research could be operational in articulating insights about the governance, provenance and authority of information. We wondered how we could employ or develop research methodologies to discern, authenticate or to simply make sense of issues.
Our aim with the workshop model was to extend design research as an investigative and critical practice. We chose to depart from and inquire into moments of leakage. A leak announces itself as an interruption. It cuts through the noise. It has the capacity to move information across thresholds and through barriers. Such moments of rupture allow us to learn about the dynamics and mechanics of power. The course reimagined the MAGMD studio as four collaborative research hubs – each approaching concerns of leakage from distinct starting points and through specific research methodologies guided by guest tutors Audrey Samson and Francisco Gallardo
@la_fraud , Ruben Pater
@untoldstoriesamsterdam Marwan Kaabour
@ustaz_marwan and David Benqué
@davidbenque . Each of our guests were invited to work with a learning and teaching model based on reciprocity — to use this as a moment to collectively investigate, to further their own and one another’s knowledge, through the procedures of practice.
![The year is 2017•Something or Other: Uncertainty invites Ruben Pater @untoldstoriesamsterdam Sinead Evans @_sinead.evansKenneth Goldsmith, Nina Paim @paimnina David Rudnick @ex_terra Tobias Revell @tobias_revell Femke Herregraven @femherregraven and Alex Wilkie •Uncertainty and precariousness are characteristics of our (post-digital) times. The dominant political ideology of neoliberalism has intrinsically linked individualism and personal productivity to economic survival, made possible through complex, ubiquitous and pervasive computational networks and systems.Technologies demand constant connectivity and perpetual consumption and contribute, according to Mark Fisher, to the current attack on the subject, come consumers of services (educational, political, economical etc). The next generation of designers will enter this uncertainty and it is not a comfortable place to be: it raises existential questions about living in this complex and fragmented world, as well as requiring designers to consider their responsibilities in designing (for/through/with) uncertainties: political, economic, educational, environmental.•Something or Other is a co-curated series [of presentations, conversations, events] that sets out to enquire into the particularities of contemporary culture. It takes the form of staged lectures and framed debates intending to provoke dialogue, debate and curiosity.](https://sp1.pixwox.com/p/pt_3740292328364251275231_0_b166f8f815f4669cee4802b092be3289.jpg?v/t51.2885-15/68725827_429235274363469_5105215373742168970_n.jpg?stp=dst-jpg_e35_s640x640_sh0.08&_nc_ht=scontent-sjc3-1.cdninstagram.com&_nc_cat=109&_nc_ohc=70xfM0VZr-kQ7kNvgFiSUPu&edm=ALdeuSgBAAAA&ccb=7-5&oh=00_AYA3auc2JRQLY4xD1oxUzsVGOeHNOtEgeOotMrnRd2azSw&oe=668CED85&_nc_sid=9fa07d)
