Dread & Desire:
Urban Futures at the Scale of the Human Body
EXHIBITION / 2017
Organized, Curated, and Designed in conjunction with International Association of Societies for Design Research (IASDR) 2017 conference.
This exhibition of student design projects was organized to coincide with the 2017 IASDR conference, hosted at the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP), University of Cincinnati. "Dread & Desire: Urban Futures at the Scale of the Human Body" was comprised of select projects from undergraduate and graduate studios on speculative design for urban futures.
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Five emergent topical themes were used to organize the exhibited projects: Yearning for an Authentic Self, Computational Politics, Semi– Virtual– Life, Social Spaces of Communication, and Basic Needs 3.0. Visitors were given multiple opportunities to engage in discourse with the themes and the projects through response cards, participatory self-guided workshops, and discussion areas.
Five emergent topical themes were used to organize the exhibited projects: Yearning for an Authentic Self, Computational Politics, Semi– Virtual– Life, Social Spaces of Communication, and Basic Needs 3.0. Visitors were given multiple opportunities to engage in discourse with the themes and the projects through response cards, participatory self-guided workshops, and discussion areas.
Visitors were given multiple opportunities to engage in discourse with the themes and the projects through response cards, participatory self-guided workshops, and discussion areas.
PUBLICATION / 2017
Catalog Written, Edited, and Designed in conjunction with Dread & Desire: Urban Futures at the Scale of the Human Body
The exhibition catalog merged project summaries with many of their research inputs alongside an editorial essay I wrote to synthesize the objectives and outcomes of the class and exhibition.
View catalog PDF 
The catalog was shared with a diverse pool of researchers, scholars, and authors whose work was read by the students, providing theoretical frameworks and/or inspiration in their work. This also yielded some incredible new relationships and guest speakers for the course.
RELATED PUBLICATIONS
Wizinsky, M. (2019) “Speculative City: Critical Speculation in Defense of Design’s Material Expertise.” Dialectic, 2(2): 23–46. Published by the AIGA Design Educators Community (DEC ) and University of Michigan Publishing.
Wizinsky, M. (2017) “Dread & Desire: Urban Futures at the Scale of the Human Body.” IASDR 2017 Exhibition Catalog. Scholar@UC: 16 pp. DOI: 10.7945/C2BD6W