The public design office

The Public Design Office departs from Onkar Kular’s and Henric Benesch’s research platform The Right to Design and their speculative proposal for a ‘Public Design Office’. The residency is composed of several various parts that are taking place in different sites within Falkenberg and involves diverse actors and perspectives:

In dialogue with local, national, and international collaborators Onkar Kular and Henric Benesch experiments with design in the service of the public or the common and in November they invited you to a two-day public programme filled with artistic interventions, talks and music. What if we regarded design, or to design, as a basic right, like writing or reading? What would a society where “all citizens/inhabitants are offered good conditions to influence the development of public spaces” really implicate?

Directed by Lekkontoret the project space at the Design Museum Rian was transformed into a play oriented and co-created environment that culminates during the autumn leave. What if we allowed youth and children to contribute to the interpretation of the public as competent and engaged designers and citizens?

At the residential area Sloalyckan the social practice of the builders and makers in the collective baucircus made an AIO re-visit where they picked up on the locally rooted building process, they initiated together with residents for the AIO residency Disruptions in Utopia, Land Left Behind in 2021. What if we dissolved the dividing lines between professions and opened for co-creation that responded directly to local requisites?

Then what would happen?