Designcities: Detroit
Detroit, MI — February 20-23, 2014
- Motor City/Brick City Comparative Ecologies, Part I: Geographies of Drinking by Gabrielle Esperdy
- Different Data Wall Map by Dan McCafferty, Joshua Singer, Patricio Davila, Rachele Riley
- City of Salt by Steve Bowden
- Detroit Gold Record by Lincoln Hancock
- Update from the Detroit Phonographers Union by Ben Gaydos, Julia Yezbick
- INTERRUPT = RISE/FALL by Rebecca Tegtmeyer
- The Detroit Phonographers Union / Urban Acoustic Ecologies by Benjamin Gaydos, Julia Yezbick
- Update on Different Data by Rachele Riley
- Writing the Essay, Different Data by Rachele Riley
- Poetic Flip by Emily Luce
- Detroit / Food / Ephemera by Emily Luce, Libby Taggart
- Writing the Essay by Ben Van Dyke, Bobby Campbell, Chris Fox, Emily Luce, Joshua Singer, Rachel Fishman, Rachele Riley, Rebecca Tegtmeyer
“Why do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because I want to ask questions. If I had answers, I’d be a politician.”
“The world breaks everyone. And afterward, many are strong at the broken places. Those that it does not break, it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave, impartially.”
— Hemingway / A Farewell to Arms
Detroit represents a city in constant flux like no other on the American landscape. The tectonic shift of the city’s economy has created deep chasms in which artists and designers have found success in rare creative ventures. The DesignInquiry/DesignCity Detroit Winter Inquiry is a brief expedition by a small group of designers (in the broadest sense) into the design landscape. We will explore Detroit as a naturally emergent system of creative and cultural activities. Here design is both the system and cultural activity of study, and the method of exploration.
We see Detroit as a case study for learning more about sub-structures that emerge within larger structures that have failed and for observing and analyzing the ways that communities facilitate these new realities in response to change. All systems have balances of success and failure, ebbs and flows, positive and negative feedback loops that create equilibrium within their respective ecologies. Assuming we are all navigating the curve of a success/fail cycle, then what might we observe to be true for Detroit? How can we represent these findings and of what use are they to the ecology of the city itself?