Design Museum´s Open Call is looking for an exhibition on material and materiality

The Design Museum is announcing its third Design Club Open Call to seek new content for the Gallery space. This year the museum is looking for exhibition entries that deal with material and materiality. The exhibition will be opened to the public as part of the programme of Helsinki Design Week in September 2020.

This year’s theme is material and materiality. Working with and controlling different materials is key part of design. The development of new materials and studying the limits and potential of existing materials have become permanent aspects of design. The proposal can be an exhibition, installation or intervention, and may consist of one or more works.

Society is becoming more and more digital and this transformation is shaking up traditional product design and increasing the significance of immaterial design. At the same time, the global relationship with material has reached a critical juncture as a result of overproduction and overconsumption. Design Museum´s Open Call attempts to challenge our thoughts about materials and materiality in design: What role does material play in a digital society, or in the midst of an environmental crisis? What kind of new perspective does the circular economy, for example, provide?

Materials have potential as both a designer’s tool and a generator of social change. The Open Call prompts people to consider whether a material – in the hands of a designer – can be an enabler of political change, or how materials can affect consumers’ thinking. And is it possible to form platforms around materials that could enable the creation of new information?

The selected project can use the Museum’s Gallery from 4 September to 25 October 2020, gets production funding to the amount of €10,000 and assistance in keeping with the museum’s curatorial, exhibition mounting and information practices.

During the 2019 Helsinki Design Week, the Critical Tide exhibition was dedicated to design in and around the seas. The exhibition is now touring and opened in Brussels at the premises of the Committee of the Regions.

In 2018 Dialogue exhibition by Milla Vaahtera showcased a series of mobiles and stabiles made of free-blown glass and hand-worked brass.

Applications period 29 November–11 January 2020, more info can be found here.

Photos: Paavo Lehtonen / Enter & Encounter exhibition at the Design Museum (2017).