Experimental Thinking / Design Practices

Experimental Thinking/Design Practices at Griffith University Art Gallery, Brisbane, explores several themes integral to how artists and designers develop research. The exhibition draws together a number of approaches to the challenges of global warming, big data, and embodied experience in the digital context. These challenges are taken up in the processes of participatory and co-design, speculative design, and exploratory experimental research in art and design. The impetus for the exhibitions is the increasingly heated debates about the narrow strictures of categorisation in art and design and the emergent strategies of cultural probes, design games, provotypes, and the frontrunners of critical and speculative design. It is the third in a series of exhibitions, the others of which included Feral Experimental: New Design Thinking at the University of New South Wales Galleries, Sydney, from July to August 2014, and Experimental Practice: Provocations In and Out of Design at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University Design Hub, Melbourne, in May 2015. The exhibitions aim to provoke debate about the purpose of design in a format that is modified for each location. These iterations of the exhibition include practitioners from the communities in which they were shown, and were developed by Katherine Moline in Sydney, Katherine Moline, Laurene Vaughan and Brad Haylock in Melbourne, and Katherine Moline, Peter Hall and Beck Davis in Brisbane.