Curator's Talk: Alice Rawsthorn - Design as an Attitude

Alice Rawsthorn explores how design’s evolution into the elastic, eclectic and improvisational agent of change, described in her latest book Design as an Attitude, will help it to address urgent and complex social, political, economic and ecological challenges.

This talk includes a response from Linda Doyle and Lisa Godson.

Alice Rawsthorn, guest curator of Dublin Art Book Fair 2020, is an award-winning design critic and author, whose books include Hello World: Where Design Meets Life and, most recently, Design as an Attitude. Her weekly design column for The New York Times was syndicated worldwide for over a decade. She is a co-founder with Paola Antonelli of the Design Emergency project to investigate design’s response to the Covid-19 crisis and its aftermath.

Linda Doyle is Professor of Engineering and The Arts, the Vice President for Research and Dean of Research in Trinity College Dublin. Prof. Doyle has been combining creative arts practices with Engineering for many years. She founded the Orthogonal Methods Group (OMG) a research initiative that works in critical and creative tension with technology with the purpose of generating knowledges, insights and alternative research orientations across disciplines that are sometimes perceived to be mutually exclusive.

Lisa Godson is the programme leader of the MA Design History and Material Culture at Dublin’s National College Art & Design, and Visiting Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin. Her design criticism and research has been published across a range of journals including Architectural Review, the Journal of Design History and Design and Culture. Recent publications include Uniform: Clothing and Discipline in the Modern World and Modern Religious Architecture in Ireland and Germany. Godson is a Director of the Irish Architecture Foundation and a Trustee of the Design History Society.

This event takes place as part of Dublin Art Book Fair 2020: Design as an Attitude, sponsored by Henry J Lyons.