Q&A | Aric Chen on this year’s Design Futures Forum at Singapore Design Week
An exclusive interview with the Zaha Hadid Foundation director on co-curating this year’s Design Futures Forum, ‘Braving Complexities’
How did you arrive at the theme “Braving Complexities”?
Co-curator Ong Ker-Shing (of Lekker Architects) and I thought it was time to shift away from the conventional design forum tendency of presenting design as a problem-solving exercise to one of navigating complexity. There is no straightforward path from problem to solution. Instead, we are looking at a much messier nexus of intertwined and often contradictory phenomena, needs, mechanisms and both intended and unintended consequences that require negotiating a whole range of social, cultural, technological, economic, political, human and non-human factors. However, this is not something to be discouraged by. We should, instead, embrace it. Hence, the theme “braving complexities”.
How have you ensured the forum will help to move the needle on the complexities the world is facing?
We are probably not going to save the world with one forum, but I hope we can make some small difference by changing how we think and talk about design and its potential for tackling the many challenges we face. Design has a lot to offer as a negotiator, articulator and interlocutor for the range of approaches and perspectives that we will need in tackling complex realities. We have incredible ideas and tools at our disposal, from biomaterials to smart wearables to AI, but we have to consider what the drawbacks, unintended consequences, missing ingredients and counter-arguments are, so that in pursuing these “solutions”, we are not simply creating more problems.
What do you hope audiences will take away from the forum?
The scope of the forum is quite broad, in terms of the range of speakers, issues and topics, and we hope audiences will see that as a strength. We will have everyone from a grower of products from fungus and a researcher who argues for the agency of fungi as designers themselves, to those creating digital health tools for Google and a speculative designer, Briton Thomas Thwaites, who specialises in impossibility (he once tried living as a goat). Tackling the future will, of course, require deep knowledge, but also broad knowledge or, in other words, an agility in finding unexpected connections and new approaches to addressing problems.