Papers by Tristan Schultz
Journal of Futures Studies, 2019
Much of the academic and professional discourse within the design disciplines over the last centu... more Much of the academic and professional discourse within the design disciplines over the last century has been bereft of a critical reflection on the politics of design practice, and on the politics of the artifacts, systems and practices that designerly activity produces. Our premise is that-notwithstanding important and valued exceptions-design theory, practice, and pedagogy as a whole are not geared towards delivering the kinds
A Keynote at Auckland Media Design School Conference: Emerging Technologies, Design and Indigenou... more A Keynote at Auckland Media Design School Conference: Emerging Technologies, Design and Indigenous Culture as part of Auckland techweek on Wednesday 10th May 2017
In this age of the anthropocence – in this complex ‘modern’ world – how might groups understand t... more In this age of the anthropocence – in this complex ‘modern’ world – how might groups understand their pasts and presents as gathering futures that fuse humans with things? A fusion that either adds time or takes it away from being human. In this talk, interdisciplinary designer, strategist and decolonising design member Tristan Schultz will explore decolonial mapping and designing techniques that can help people grapple with these kinds of questions.
A talk with Luiza Prado, Danah Abdulla and myself on Decolonising Design Education, given at 'Exc... more A talk with Luiza Prado, Danah Abdulla and myself on Decolonising Design Education, given at 'Exclusive Access: On the dynamics and vocabularies of co-option, care and the subaltern', Research Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale 2017
by Mahmoud Keshavarz, Clive Dilnot, Luiza Prado de O. Martins, Pedro J S Vieira de Oliveira, Matthew Kiem, Ece Canlı, Ahmed Ansari, Tristan Schultz, Joanna Boehnert, Paola Pierri, and Isabel Mager Today the topic of design and politics is not unfamiliar to designers or those in politics. Yet d... more Today the topic of design and politics is not unfamiliar to designers or those in politics. Yet despite designers’ engagement in community-based activities, design discourse has not been able yet to produce a useful lexicon of concepts that could offer possibilities of acting politically through design. The reason behind this could be seen in various complexities and difficulties involved in such possible discourses.
One way to approach such difficulties is through an intra-disciplinary engagement not with the fields of design and politics but with the effects that design and politics produce through a series of internal, mutual co-relations. These effects are manifested and produced not merely through legislative and institutional practices, but through designed artefacts, spaces, sites and technologies. Ranging from gentrified public squares to high security checkpoints, from precarious production lines to everyday gendered goods, such material co-enactments of design and politics regulate and manipulate people’s bodies, abilities, movements, inhabitations and life conditions in various ways, based on their race, ethnicity, social and legal status, gender and sexuality. From this perspective, the concept of intersectionality can be a useful frame and method to interrogate how design and politics co-shape each other through power relations across race, gender and class, as well as other identity attributions. Intersectionality teaches us that politics cannot be only understood through rigid power categories but through a matrix of forces and relations that produce different effects in different sites and moments, with different bodies and positions. Scholars in postcolonial feminism have discussed the concept of intersectionality widely and have used it as a method to interrogate various sites and spaces of power.
This symposium is an attempt to initiate a space of thinking for discussing the concept of intersectionality from the agency of design and designing in particular and materiality in general. It seems that intersectionality could be a useful method for understanding the politics and political agency of design:
- How do design and designing participate and reinforce power structures in an intersectional way through and across race, gender and class?
- How can design and designing offer novel ways to understand the ways in which power operates in intersectional ways?
- And possibly how can design and designing propose ways of intervening in such complex and intersectional power relations?
+ This is the full program embedding the links to full papers +
Just as all of us in this room understand that global warming is an emergent consequence of the p... more Just as all of us in this room understand that global warming is an emergent consequence of the past couple centuries greenhouse gas emissions’ accumulative atmospheric life, I would like us to all understand design too as bringing ‘things’ into existence now, pointed at the future; constituting our future. And just as global warming travels back towards us faster and faster, so too does design. Design, whether product design, communication design, engineering, architecture and interior design, service and systems design, is immensely powerful, and the field is now beginning to comprehend this immense transformative power.
The aim of this chapter is to document, review and critically analyze the three-part event series... more The aim of this chapter is to document, review and critically analyze the three-part event series, Making an Age of Repair: Queensland, and its implementation of participatory design practices. This series was designed with the recognition that current future plans for Queensland (Australia) are not sustainable and do not address the future challenges faced by the state. This event series aimed to address this by engaging community members to identify urban issues that were most prominent to them and participate in designing the changes they see necessary to get to a desired future. This chapter outlines the tools and techniques used at each event to engage the public in designing for the future of Queensland. The chapter concludes with a critical analysis of the effectiveness of this event and argues that while the participatory tools utilized within the series were useful in developing new understandings and ideas, maintaining momentum in implementing concepts remains an ongoing challenge that requires further research.
This paper is a case study of the design and facilitation, undertaken by our practice, of Brisban... more This paper is a case study of the design and facilitation, undertaken by our practice, of Brisbane, Australia’s largest one-day educational event, the FutureBNE Water Security Challenge, held in both 2016 and 2017. 11- to 12-year-old students were asked to design ideas to secure Brisbane’s water supply with the understanding that this will be under threat over the coming century due to mounting future challenges.
This paper traces a historical and conceptual terrain of cultures of repair from a decolonial and... more This paper traces a historical and conceptual terrain of cultures of repair from a decolonial and ontological design perspective, i.e., through decolonial design. In the face of present and mounting future challenges, particularly Climate Change, consequent migration and global unsettlement, indiscriminately reaching all geographies, cultures of repair afford ecological, social, and technological exemplars of adaptation and resilience. Yet neither the complexity of the trace nor the imperative for appropriation is adequately reaching designers. To explore filling this gap, a relational map is presented here, that aims to aide designers understand four key threads implicated in the destruction of cultures of repair—concealment; newness; techne; care—and three key moves toward revaluing cultures of repair— transferrability, reclassification, amplification.
As was the case for Walter Benjamin in his reading of Paul Klee’s artwork print Angelus Novus (19... more As was the case for Walter Benjamin in his reading of Paul Klee’s artwork print Angelus Novus (1969) of future challenges piling at our feet, it has become increasingly clear that ‘we’, that is predominantly Modern Western Society with our backs turned to the future, lack the ability to ‘see’ the complexity of future challenges. These challenges include climate change, population growth, and a continuation of colonialism, war and the effects of technology amongst others. To adequately see future challenges we need to find ways to see relational complexity, however this skill has been lost to rationalism.
Think Outside Design and Conflict: Repair was filmed on Wednesday 30 September 2015 at The Edge, ... more Think Outside Design and Conflict: Repair was filmed on Wednesday 30 September 2015 at The Edge, Queensland.
Think Outside is an annual talk series inviting local, national and international design thinkers to contemplate a ‘wicked problem’. This year:
How might design intervene in points of tension before they escalate?
How might design counteract the ongoing social, environmental and psychological impacts of conflict?
At the first event in the series Tristan Schultz and Rebecca Barnett consider how design might employ acts of repair before, during or after conflict.
Tristan Schultz and Rebecca Barnett: skip to 11:07 min
https://vimeo.com/141633100
Its 2065…
The is little knowledge that remains was long seduced by the crumbling modernist facad... more Its 2065…
The is little knowledge that remains was long seduced by the crumbling modernist facades propping-up signs of broken dreams floating in thick polluted air.
Our physiology is not coping with the rapid heat rise, our blood is not coping with the migrating diseases and germs. We’re sick, we’re irritated, and due to climatic conditions, in swathes of millions, we’re forcibly displaced.
Nobody lives here anymore, the views are obsolete.
Planes do not land here anymore, tourists do not visit.
This event extended on design fictions developed at Event 1. These were the desired futures that ... more This event extended on design fictions developed at Event 1. These were the desired futures that were designed back from to determine what actions could be implemented in the present that would contribute to the creation of those futures. Repair Bench and Repair Brief activities were undertaken in Event 2. We welcome everyone to use this section as a template or toolkit for their own investigations.
The idea of the ‘Making an Age of Repair: Queensland’ Event developed from our understanding that... more The idea of the ‘Making an Age of Repair: Queensland’ Event developed from our understanding that we live in a broken world and that sometimes this brokenness overwhelms our ability to instigate meaningful change. This brokenness is evidenced in structural unsustainability appearing in forms such as: global inequality, geopolitical instability, climate change, social fragmentation and the loss of traditional cultural values and practices.
Kartogrifa In-Flux – Thinking, Talking, Building Alternative Pasts-Futures (KIF), the authors pro... more Kartogrifa In-Flux – Thinking, Talking, Building Alternative Pasts-Futures (KIF), the authors project (Schultz, 2012), is a mediation object created on the East Coast of Australia in 2012, KIF revealed valuable insights in relation to aiding students in navigating the complexities of challenging ‘Eurocentrism’. see the project at kartogrifa.org
Email me for the the book chapter.
Tourism as a venture is in the business of exchange. It has become clear that the tourist is not ... more Tourism as a venture is in the business of exchange. It has become clear that the tourist is not a passive observer of spectacle, but rather an active agent in change. The interaction between tourism operator and tourist is a complex exchange of meanings, interpretations and sensibilities. Australian Aboriginal tourism ventures offer the opportunity for a rich exchange between Aboriginal Australians and participants in tourism encounters. The quality of this exchange is a matter of how the participants come to view the content, and how this might lead towards a new view, experience, or perhaps even a shifted mode of being; an ontological shift. What is at stake in any exchange is the perpetuation of a Eurocentric gaze; to view an Aboriginal cultural expression as merely aesthetic appearance; as a spectacle (Debord, 1994). This is problematic because gazing at Aboriginal cultural expressions as a spectacle simplifies, reduces and pays no respect to the complexities of Indigenous Knowledge (IK), that is the non-text based relational systems of knowledge that many Aboriginal people regard as constituting those expressions. Therefore, the gaze delegitimises non phonetic-alphabetic forms of writing knowledge and as such it is logocentric. Aboriginal cultural expressions such as traditional dancing or singing are ‘giving’, mediating signification of Indigenous Knowledge through corporeal movement and/or oral transmission, it is up to observers to ‘give’ in return. The nature of this mutual and equitable exchange is in no way understood, yet urgently begs engagement for cultural destruction to cease.
Humanity is facing, at both global and local levels,
unprecedented challenges as the future, a by... more Humanity is facing, at both global and local levels,
unprecedented challenges as the future, a byproduct
of modernity, hurtles towards us. These
future challenges are complex and world changing
and include, but are not limited to, climate
change, population growth, increasing poverty, the
continuation of colonialism, war and the effects of
technology. As designers we need to make use of
the power that design holds not just to recognise,
consider and design for these futures that we are
facing but equally, to design for the ontological
redirection of destructive future scenarios.
To address these destructive futures and harness
the transformative power that design holds new
design thinking approaches need to be developed
and explored. This paper will explore the use
of Cognitive Redirective Mapping as a design
thinking approach. Cognitive Redirective mapping
has been designed as a process that challenges our
destructive, anthropocentric being-in-the-world
through an exploratory approach to the production
of knowledge that traces relational impacts of
things with regard to their indivisible relation to the
creation and destruction of a future for our species.
The 'Kids who Care and Repair' is a design project that focuses on the development of repair work... more The 'Kids who Care and Repair' is a design project that focuses on the development of repair workshops for children, aiming to foster cultures of repair.
The work is being conducted in conjunction with Redirective Practice. It is platformed from my own ongoing research into repair including my Zoontechnica article on Event-based learning and my Masters Honours thesis 'Retrofitting Furniture; Rethinking Waste' which explored, in detail, the repair of furniture and Tristan Schultz's work with Pimpama State Secondary College on creating cultures of repair.
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Papers by Tristan Schultz
One way to approach such difficulties is through an intra-disciplinary engagement not with the fields of design and politics but with the effects that design and politics produce through a series of internal, mutual co-relations. These effects are manifested and produced not merely through legislative and institutional practices, but through designed artefacts, spaces, sites and technologies. Ranging from gentrified public squares to high security checkpoints, from precarious production lines to everyday gendered goods, such material co-enactments of design and politics regulate and manipulate people’s bodies, abilities, movements, inhabitations and life conditions in various ways, based on their race, ethnicity, social and legal status, gender and sexuality. From this perspective, the concept of intersectionality can be a useful frame and method to interrogate how design and politics co-shape each other through power relations across race, gender and class, as well as other identity attributions. Intersectionality teaches us that politics cannot be only understood through rigid power categories but through a matrix of forces and relations that produce different effects in different sites and moments, with different bodies and positions. Scholars in postcolonial feminism have discussed the concept of intersectionality widely and have used it as a method to interrogate various sites and spaces of power.
This symposium is an attempt to initiate a space of thinking for discussing the concept of intersectionality from the agency of design and designing in particular and materiality in general. It seems that intersectionality could be a useful method for understanding the politics and political agency of design:
- How do design and designing participate and reinforce power structures in an intersectional way through and across race, gender and class?
- How can design and designing offer novel ways to understand the ways in which power operates in intersectional ways?
- And possibly how can design and designing propose ways of intervening in such complex and intersectional power relations?
+ This is the full program embedding the links to full papers +
Think Outside is an annual talk series inviting local, national and international design thinkers to contemplate a ‘wicked problem’. This year:
How might design intervene in points of tension before they escalate?
How might design counteract the ongoing social, environmental and psychological impacts of conflict?
At the first event in the series Tristan Schultz and Rebecca Barnett consider how design might employ acts of repair before, during or after conflict.
Tristan Schultz and Rebecca Barnett: skip to 11:07 min
https://vimeo.com/141633100
The is little knowledge that remains was long seduced by the crumbling modernist facades propping-up signs of broken dreams floating in thick polluted air.
Our physiology is not coping with the rapid heat rise, our blood is not coping with the migrating diseases and germs. We’re sick, we’re irritated, and due to climatic conditions, in swathes of millions, we’re forcibly displaced.
Nobody lives here anymore, the views are obsolete.
Planes do not land here anymore, tourists do not visit.
Email me for the the book chapter.
unprecedented challenges as the future, a byproduct
of modernity, hurtles towards us. These
future challenges are complex and world changing
and include, but are not limited to, climate
change, population growth, increasing poverty, the
continuation of colonialism, war and the effects of
technology. As designers we need to make use of
the power that design holds not just to recognise,
consider and design for these futures that we are
facing but equally, to design for the ontological
redirection of destructive future scenarios.
To address these destructive futures and harness
the transformative power that design holds new
design thinking approaches need to be developed
and explored. This paper will explore the use
of Cognitive Redirective Mapping as a design
thinking approach. Cognitive Redirective mapping
has been designed as a process that challenges our
destructive, anthropocentric being-in-the-world
through an exploratory approach to the production
of knowledge that traces relational impacts of
things with regard to their indivisible relation to the
creation and destruction of a future for our species.
The work is being conducted in conjunction with Redirective Practice. It is platformed from my own ongoing research into repair including my Zoontechnica article on Event-based learning and my Masters Honours thesis 'Retrofitting Furniture; Rethinking Waste' which explored, in detail, the repair of furniture and Tristan Schultz's work with Pimpama State Secondary College on creating cultures of repair.
One way to approach such difficulties is through an intra-disciplinary engagement not with the fields of design and politics but with the effects that design and politics produce through a series of internal, mutual co-relations. These effects are manifested and produced not merely through legislative and institutional practices, but through designed artefacts, spaces, sites and technologies. Ranging from gentrified public squares to high security checkpoints, from precarious production lines to everyday gendered goods, such material co-enactments of design and politics regulate and manipulate people’s bodies, abilities, movements, inhabitations and life conditions in various ways, based on their race, ethnicity, social and legal status, gender and sexuality. From this perspective, the concept of intersectionality can be a useful frame and method to interrogate how design and politics co-shape each other through power relations across race, gender and class, as well as other identity attributions. Intersectionality teaches us that politics cannot be only understood through rigid power categories but through a matrix of forces and relations that produce different effects in different sites and moments, with different bodies and positions. Scholars in postcolonial feminism have discussed the concept of intersectionality widely and have used it as a method to interrogate various sites and spaces of power.
This symposium is an attempt to initiate a space of thinking for discussing the concept of intersectionality from the agency of design and designing in particular and materiality in general. It seems that intersectionality could be a useful method for understanding the politics and political agency of design:
- How do design and designing participate and reinforce power structures in an intersectional way through and across race, gender and class?
- How can design and designing offer novel ways to understand the ways in which power operates in intersectional ways?
- And possibly how can design and designing propose ways of intervening in such complex and intersectional power relations?
+ This is the full program embedding the links to full papers +
Think Outside is an annual talk series inviting local, national and international design thinkers to contemplate a ‘wicked problem’. This year:
How might design intervene in points of tension before they escalate?
How might design counteract the ongoing social, environmental and psychological impacts of conflict?
At the first event in the series Tristan Schultz and Rebecca Barnett consider how design might employ acts of repair before, during or after conflict.
Tristan Schultz and Rebecca Barnett: skip to 11:07 min
https://vimeo.com/141633100
The is little knowledge that remains was long seduced by the crumbling modernist facades propping-up signs of broken dreams floating in thick polluted air.
Our physiology is not coping with the rapid heat rise, our blood is not coping with the migrating diseases and germs. We’re sick, we’re irritated, and due to climatic conditions, in swathes of millions, we’re forcibly displaced.
Nobody lives here anymore, the views are obsolete.
Planes do not land here anymore, tourists do not visit.
Email me for the the book chapter.
unprecedented challenges as the future, a byproduct
of modernity, hurtles towards us. These
future challenges are complex and world changing
and include, but are not limited to, climate
change, population growth, increasing poverty, the
continuation of colonialism, war and the effects of
technology. As designers we need to make use of
the power that design holds not just to recognise,
consider and design for these futures that we are
facing but equally, to design for the ontological
redirection of destructive future scenarios.
To address these destructive futures and harness
the transformative power that design holds new
design thinking approaches need to be developed
and explored. This paper will explore the use
of Cognitive Redirective Mapping as a design
thinking approach. Cognitive Redirective mapping
has been designed as a process that challenges our
destructive, anthropocentric being-in-the-world
through an exploratory approach to the production
of knowledge that traces relational impacts of
things with regard to their indivisible relation to the
creation and destruction of a future for our species.
The work is being conducted in conjunction with Redirective Practice. It is platformed from my own ongoing research into repair including my Zoontechnica article on Event-based learning and my Masters Honours thesis 'Retrofitting Furniture; Rethinking Waste' which explored, in detail, the repair of furniture and Tristan Schultz's work with Pimpama State Secondary College on creating cultures of repair.