User:Troyth5/Imagining Recovery

Imagining Recovery is an initiative to assert the importance of design in a post-crash economy.

Imagining Recovery was begun in January of 2009 by Troy Conrad Therrien and Wayne Congar, masters students at the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation at Columbia University. The initiative acts as a form of organization and exhibition of the work of designers responding to the policies and promises of the Obama administration.

The initiative seeks to enlist the skills of the design community to both imagine and image the possible futures described by the presidency in his policy plans, speeches and other forms of promise and projection. The initiative seeks to stand in parallel with recovery.gov, a website which makes transparent the spending of the federal government in numerical terms. As a parallel, the initiative asks designers to produce imagery as an interpretation of these numbers, and other non-visual forms of transparency.

The initiative takes many forms, including competition, publication, exhibition, conference and on-going debate and discussion forums. The initiative applauds the president for ushering in a new era of governance, particularly in shedding light on the mechanisms and hopes of the government for its people. Imagining Recovery asks designers to take up the challenge to contribute to this task, and employ their skills to make these measures visible in ways in which the design community is best suited.

The initiative is one branch of a number of projects directed under the student think tank and production unit, labRAD.

Design Economy
Imagining Recovery is a forum for the design community to assert itself in a changing economic environment, in the midst of a collapse of private sector commissions, and the promise of massive public works. The impetus for this forum is to challenge the long held belief that design acts in adding value, as opposed to possessing and providing a value uniquely its own. The Towards a Design Economy competition address the idea of design capital, and how it can circulate in a design economy after the crash of the financial economy.

As it is an argument for real value, the brief comes from the very real words and policies of the new Presidential administration of America. It focusses on American policies as a starting point, but the charge is a conceptual one which is extensible to all countries and continents, and, thus, international participation is eagerly encouraged. Formally, the competition takes a novel approach to the idea of a competition itself. The competition seeks to engage the internal faculty of language and the public faculty of representation, or seeing, over which the design community can claim expertise. The competition folds both the preparation and the afterlife into the typical moments of submission and judging, employing a blog to allow participants to post comments, react to the brief, and treat it as a living document over which they have ownership. The brief will be given initially, and then democratically re-written by participants up until a cut-off date when it will be frozen, allowing it to react to new measures released by the presidential administration.

The competition judging process will happen privately, and culminate with a public reception, in which the jurors will present, in a conference-like format, their reasons for choosing as they have, using the work -- not limited to the few winners -- to demonstrate their positions. The afterlife of the competition will be produced in a publication of the evolution of the brief, the conference transcript, and a large number of the submissions. Further, multiple museum installations of the work will occur simultaneously throughout the world with video recordings of the conference judging.

Affiliations
Imagining Recovery is one branch of a number of projects produced by the think tank and production-unit, the Laboratory for Research, Architecture and Design, labRAD. Congar is the founder of labRAD, and Therrien is one of its earliest members. labRAD acts as a node in a network of students across America and Europe to collectively produce projects. Although currently limited to two continents, labRAD is looking for collaborators across the globe in all disciplines.

Imagining Recovery is affiliated with its host institution, the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University. The affiliation is based on direct support from Dean Mark Wigley, and an on-going relationship with Volume Magazine, produced by the Columbia Laboratory for Architectural Broadcasting, C-LAB.

The initiative is also affiliated with the Museum of Modern Art, as the directors are in continuous conversation with head curator of Architecture and Design, Barry Bergdoll.

The initiative uses open-source communication tools provided free-of-charge by Google.