We are wrapping up the last details and giving a hand to gather content on a new website: http://on-purpose.info

This website is the documentation of an exhibition we are part of, it’s called On Purpose, and it’s taking place at Arnolfini in Bristol. The aim of this exhibition is to look at design practices which are close to the notion of art, but still distinct.

url: http://on-purpose.info

As the curators Nav Haq from Arnolfini and Åbäke put it: “On Purpose: Design Concepts looks at conceptual design practices, the emergence of ‘meta design’, and the question of who or what can define something as design.”

The exhibition will present interventions and work by a selection of the most interesting and ‘speculative’ designers today. In recent years, the field of design has evolved significantly having embraced conceptualism and technology, and is now offering advanced parallel theoretical practices to contemporary art. Yet the renowned principle that has been given to design in order to differentiate it from contemporary art is still a point of contention - that it should have specific purpose. On Purpose looks to investigate this tension around the definition of design, questioning whether ‘purpose’ is actually its ultimate constraint.

Focussing predominantly on interventions within Arnolfini, some of which may become semi-permanent, On Purpose will also be used as an opportunity for designers to offer proposals to reshape the existing infrastructure of Arnolfini. It will look at every public facet of the institution - physical and virtual - and will aim to rethink it afresh.

On Purpose is the second in the Concept Store series of projects at Arnolfini, exploring the realms of marketing, design and experience economy.

The exhibition will be open from Sat 13 Sep - Sun 9 Nov
and hosts the works of Åbäke, Droog Design, Daniel Eatock, Electronest, Ann-Sofie Back, Will Holder, Peter Jensen, Onkar Kular & Noam Toran, Metahaven, Alex Rich, Savage, Yuri Suzuki

* The line up is quite impressive for us and we are very glad to be part of it. It was also the occasion to discuss a bit more with Will Holder, while we helped him to setup the website http://commonknowledge.at which lists and help tracking the books he lend for the exhibition from his personal collection.

** The website we designed for the exhibition On-Purpose is driven by the idea of giving to the spectator on the internet a better idea of the size of things; by using the (almost) universal ISO proportion of the A4 and a slider which change the size of the images, someone can sync the size of the images on the website with a A4 paper and get a decent idea of the proportion.

*** Recently we (re) discovered the work of Gemma Holt who did a project related to size and format; she has a different take.

**** More details about the exhibitions at Arnolfini, on their website

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 11th, 2008 at 2:42 am and is filed under collection, exhibition, network. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.