Critical Inquiry Lab

The Critical Inquiry Lab is a two-year, transdisciplinary Master study committed to research-based design as a vehicle for public activation. The programme explores the potential of design in relation to analyses of social, environmental, technological, and (material) cultural ecologies that shape our world. Students are empowered to craft practices as a synthesis of thinking by making, in independent and collaborative forms that serve as a vital means for reimagining alternative futures. Working across scales, mediums, and discourses, we interrogate the intersections of the personal with the systemic, providing skills for students to create accessible inroads into the complex entanglements that characterize our planetary condition.

The practice-theory ethos of the department is process oriented, emphasizing serious play with experimental methods, while situating design inquiries in the living histories of the present. As an exploratory space, students are invited to cultivate their voice in multiple registers through prototyping, mapping, curatorial strategy, object-based storytelling, documenting, performing, time-based media, publishing, writing, and discursive moderation. Our research-driven approach includes critically navigating the field of design itself and its legacies of worlding that compel a collective remaking in intergenerational, ecosocial justice-based, as well as human/non-human relational terms.

Community

Our students are guided by a diverse team of internationally recognised practitioners from within design and beyond, accompanied by workshops, guest lectures, excursions, site visits, as well as opportunities for public dissemination in collaboration with our partners. The intensive mentorship offered at CIL is responsive to our student’s longer-term visions, be that sustaining a studio-based professional practice, becoming an educator, working in the cultural sector, and / or pursuing further doctoral research. We equally value our rich community of student-peers who are leading a path for the future of design, and who nurture networks of mutual care throughout their period of study that endure after graduation. Applications are welcome from individuals with a background in design, art and architecture, while we also encourage curious bodyminds from other fields who are eager to experiment in speculative world-making released from doom, informed by hopeful flourishing.

Critical Relationality

At Critical Inquiry Lab hope is seen as a verb, not an attitude. It is an activity of systemic thinking, and a radical unsettling of canonized norms that govern our condition in order to witness possibility otherwise. By reimagining through remaking, research-based design is positioned as a shareable medium for public outreach of what we might call ‘cunning hope’.

From the sprawling infrastructures upon which we collectively depend, to the interfaces we use to engage with them; from the proliferation of legal codes, to the training of our sensorial bodies, design is inseparable from the ideas we hold about the world, and how we imagine ourselves in it. Engagement with these underlying ideologies is how we mobilise ‘criticality’ within the department, and in so doing, the practice of design is upheld as a reciprocity between external making and internal self-examination. To change the world of the designed environment, is to change our minds about it. We invite students to join in working on this relay together, humbly, yet ambitiously reconstructing our relations with an uncommonly lived, world in common