Platform 09

November 2 – December 20, 2009

The Graduate School of Design is the site of many research-based conjectures and experiments. In core and options studios, seminars, independent study, and thesis work, students and faculty expand the literal, figurative, and virtual boundaries of design. Despite our diverse disciplinary affiliations, the work of the school also strives to be collaborative and insistently cross-disciplinary, for only in this way can we make significant and innovative contributions to creating a better world.

Our intention is to explore the productive space between disciplinary advancement and cultural and social aspirations. We believe in the role of design as a form of constructed imagination that incorporates an ethical and political dimension. This engaged character of work provides a voice—a participatory and perceptual presence—to our design efforts. In this process, the advances in research and scholarship of the disciplines are informed by a much wider and more complex set of influences.

This exhibition seeks to feature examples of the work undertaken at the GSD that confront these issues. In addition, it attempts to present the milieu, the intellectual conditions and contexts, for the production of that work. Each year we invite a faculty member to take on the role of selecting and editing the themes and projects that, for him or her, form the focus and organizational logic of our work, and hence of the Platform exhibition and publication. This task is made more challenging by the remarkable quality of the projects of our students and faculty, as well as the scale and breadth of events sponsored by the school. One of the main aims of the exhibition is to be selective yet broadly inclusive, and to reimagine the school by demonstrating both its diversity and the grounded specificity of ideas. This year, Felipe Correa, an assistant professor in the department of urban planning and design, together with the assistance of a talented group of students, has compiled a thought-provoking collection of projects and writings that highlight many of our current preoccupations. It is the amalgam and the consistency of these endeavors across multiple disciplines that makes the GSD so distinct.

Mohsen Mostafavi
Dean,
Alexander and
Victoria Wiley
Professor of Design