Upcoming exhibition: Exchange, October 2015 in Philadelphia

David SargentDVA, ExhibitionsLeave a Comment

I have been given another great opportunity to submit a work in a follow up from last years Design In Flux show in Philly. This time the show is bigger, and I plan to build on the work from last year by trying to develop it into an animation.

This particular exhibition will be themed and titled Exchange. From the submission notes:


In professional design practice, design has been conceived a service performed in exchange for fees, but in its larger, longer history, design is a cultural practice enmeshed in custom, obligation and unwritten understandings. While widespread nuanced and complex systems of exchange have been articulated and theorised by scholars such as Marcel Mauss (“The Gift”), Georges Bataille (“general economy”) and Jean Baudrillard (“symbolic exchange”), design discourse has largely neglected to address their importance. With growing understanding of informal systems and their importance in crisis situations, the rise of new “wiki” models of internet-enabled exchange and the “sharing economy”, the call for broader understandings and richer models of design practice is more urgent than ever before.

This exhibition of design projects and collaborations aims to shed light on the art of exchange in design practice, furthering discussion and understanding of how design projects can gain in strength and flexibility as they are passed around collaborators and exchanged across cultures.


There are quite a few links in the theme to my work, so looking forward to pulling it together. I think the only issue will be time (it always is) and finding enough to do the outcome justice.

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