Sitting With The Trouble

We are living in a moment of fracturing social contracts, climate breakdown, and automated labour. How do we respond? We choose not to look away; we stay present, and sit with the trouble. In the winter semester, we collaborated with the Open Future Lab on a thought experiment: if automated labour fully takes over and we delete conventional jobs, how would we live and what would we value? The resulting short films tell poignant, moving stories of human worth in a world without work. In the summer semester, we turned to the ultimate design cliché, the chair, not to offer comfort but to take a position on how we inhabit space and power. Alongside these briefs, our diploma students deepened themes of curiosity, fear, hope, rage, and delight through films, myths, immersive experiences, super fictions, workshops and games. Together, the works in this exhibition hint at the unexpected roles designers will play in shaping our collective futures. Welcome to Design Investigations. Take a position.