Impossible Methods: On the Existence of Designed Things

The act of designing produces other designs in the world, and does so by intervening in an entanglement of processes, performances, interactions, narratives, and relations that are all context-dependent and socio-culturally informed. The research and pedagogical practice duo A Parede understands the act of designing as one of producing material discourse; the discourses produced by designed things cannot be anything but provisional and performative. For the workshop at transmediale 2019, participants are invited to bring a designed artifact—responding to a set of keywords connected to the festival theme that will be communicated to them beforehand. They will slowly unpack the networks that inform the existence of that object in the world, as well as its implications in-use. This unpacking can take the form of narrative, performance, mapping, or anything available and/or desired; what matters is not the hows, but the whats and the whys.