Design Museum’s theme this autumn: the seas and the prospect of change

The Critical Tide project was chosen for this autumn’s gallery exhibition at the Design Museum. It will open just on time for Helsinki Design Week in September. The second round of the Design Club Open Call for exhibitions focused on critical design.

The Critical Tide exhibition to open in the autumn will combine projects and works that explore the seas and the prospect of change using design methods. Critical Tide brings together research, activism and communality in one exhibition space.

There is a multi-discipline team behind the exhibition: Julia Lohmann, Pirjo Haikola, Gillian Russell and Gero Grundmann. For the building of the exhibition, the team will receive a 10,000-euro production grant and the exhibition room in the Design Museum’s Gallery.

Design with a lower-case d

The theme for this year’s Open Call was critical design. The purpose is to question conventional ideas and to encourage pursuing alternative views and opportunities.

Critical Tide does not only focus on the result of design, such as a service or a product, but it strives to increase our awareness of social, cultural and ethical questions with the means of design.

“In this exhibition we’ll see design with a lower-case d. We focus on what kind of means and solutions designers can provide to meet the challenges,” the team members say.

Oceanic ecological networks are not visible to us in our daily lives, and therefore we only discover related problems surreptitiously. Critical Tide makes the threats that our oceans face more visible while also suggesting solutions.

“The oceans are full of opportunities to establish sustainable co-habitation with the rest of the species on Earth. We can use design to address and highlight our problems regarding the seas. And we can approach to solve these problems using design tools,” the team members say.

The exhibition will open 6 September 2019.