OPEN Publications

Essay sprint

OPEN has run its 'essay sprint' workshop several times, most recently at London Design Festival, and it remains an ongoing project. Participants are given a range of visual, audio-visual and textual 'provocations’ based on decolonial thinking. They are given pieces of A5 paper and encouraged to respond however they like - e.g. drawing, writing or mark-making of any kind, in any language, or even ripping up the paper and using it as a 3D object. We then collect the responses and created a larger 'essay' that is co-generated across multiple spaces and moments.

There are several ideas behind this workshop. It introduces radical methodologies to create new forms of knowledge, to embrace co-generative thinking, to think outside of the box/beyond the text, to collaborate as creativity. All of these ideas are underpinned by decolonial thinking, but the provocations are designed to be accessible to a wide and diverse audience through our inclusive workshop format.

A copy of our current Essay Sprint can be downloaded by clicking on the button, left.

co-generated lecture

On 20 March 2019, OPEN held its second event, CULTURE-POSITION-EMOTION. Images and footage from the event can be found on this page of our website. The event drew on radical cut-and-paste methodologies and took the form of a collage workshop, with a talk from Leren Li (V&A Museum/RCA, PhD) on her research around the Japanese art of boro. Participants talked through their work as they made it, resulting in a deconstructed, non-hierarchical ‘lecture’, which was subsequently written up and interspersed with images of the workshop outputs. A copy of this illustrated transcription can be downloaded by clicking on the button, right.

emotional practices press release

In September 2019, OPEN launched an online exhibition, Emotional Practices. To accompany this launch, the team released a press release that outlined the exhibition’s objectives and limitations. A copy of this press release can be downloaded by clicking the button, below left.

In Between Breaths: Memories, Stories, and Otherwise Design Histories

Article co-authored by Sarah Cheang, Katie Irani, Livia Rezende and Shehnaz Suterwalla, published March 2023 in the Journal of Design History (OUP).