MDes Open Project: Metabolic Rift, Shift, & Gift

To capture a range of design research interests, topics, and methods, this Open Project will begin by collectively identifying a set of salient modern metabolic rifts that emerge through design, the legacies of which continue to shape the vertiginous social and environmental inequities of contemporary life. The term “metabolic rift” refers to material and energetic disruptions into human-environment relations. As such, this Open Project work will include material, energetic, historical, ecological, geographic, and political explication of the selected metabolic rifts and their associated metabolic shifts imposed through the take/make/fake/break paradigm of modern design. This explication will include agnotological consideration of what modern design has externalized, ignored, and suppressed in its pedagogies and practices. The future can no longer be a colony of present externalizations and agnotologies. Accordingly, the final stage of analysis and projection in this Open Project will be a focus on metabolic gifts: the regenerative exuberance and reciprocal abundance of terrestrial ecologies that are vital features of both premodern as well as prospects for nonmodern life ahead.

While the eco-metabolic orientation of this Open Project suits students in Ecologies and Mediums, students in Publics and Narratives will enliven the social/political/historical/discursive dimensions of the Open Project. Participants in this Open Project will co-develop responses to the metabolic rift, shift, and gift framework through readings, discussion, research protocols, and public presentation. The course will proceed in three stages: 1. Cognition in the Wild & Media As Method will establish key working concepts and methods (1 week); 2. Metabolic Rift/Shift/Gift will focus on the theoretical and practical framework, while also collectively identifying research foci and content in small teams (5 weeks); 3. Public Projection will refine the design research content and identify the means, formats, and audiences for Open Project outcomes in the remaining weeks. Through a series of structure Protocols, individual student research and production will contribute depth to the collective output of one of four teams, with each team focused on a salient metabolic rift. Each team will develop and design a range of media and artifacts to explicate the Metabolic Rift/Shift/Gift, to be presented in a public domain.

The aim of this Open Project is an inversion of the inequities, iniquities, and injustices that emerge through the abstractions and externalizations celebrated in design pedagogy and practice. The provided framework and methods will help develop design research and outcomes that augment/amplify terrestrial ecology and relations through design, rather than extract and exploit them. In the decades ahead, the obligations and opportunities of a more literal description of what design is, does, and could be suggest a strident departure from the unequal exchanges, environmental load displacements, and underdevelopment paradigms of contemporary design tropes.