Cold sweat: making it in an anxious world

Abstract

Cold Sweat: Making it in an Anxious World is a reflective examination of 25 years of design practice. The research is proposed as a transformational trigger leading to potential platforms for future design investigation. The Anxious World is best described as a combination of the significant pressures of wicked problems and the dominant ideology described by John Wood in his book 'Designing for Micro-utopias: Making the unthinkable possible', that ‘the individual consumer is God … the belief system that propels the economy’ (2007). Examining the place of my own practice within a range of theoretical models has led to a clarification of its position in what I’m referring to as a seam space that has allowed the negotiation of a generalised anxiety over a lengthy professional career. I use the tolerant and non-binary model of quadratic consciousness proposed by Wood and based on Leonhard Eular’s visual schema, which argues for a network of designers, greater than the sum of its parts responding to those pressures. This model positions the practice in a broader network. The thesis utilises a practice map that has emerged from theoretical exploration and reflection at an historical juncture in my career. It is deployed to frame the two case studies that form the primary methodology for the research – 'Obsessed: Compelled to make' (Australian Design Centre, 2018) and 'Book Club' (Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery, 2017). A comparison of these case studies informs the conclusions on which a future practice can be based.