Dossier / ‘To beyond or not to be’, our slogan over these years, has proven its relevance. By becoming the norm it’s topicality has been lost. It is time to move forward and take new directions.
Within these 10 years of Volume’s existence, money has become so ingrained in our neoliberal world as a universal metric, dominated as it is by the market and marketing, that societies have lost sight of almost any other forms of value such as fairness, trust, equity, beauty, rest and uselessness. These are values we think need to be brought back to the surface, but by just going beyond we might lose sight. Powerful and highly interconnected bureaucratic systems are ruling that world that nobody seems to steer or fully understand. We as cultural agents have to go to the edges of the system we cannot leave, to scratch at some backdoors that have no door-handles and put some wrenches to work; to dig and excavate, to unfold and rewrap.
Design is, by definition, inhuman. We humans design, yet we do not, cannot really, at least not yet, design humans. Yet the boundaries of contemporary design increasingly encroach upon the real. The design of fleshy bodies, genetics, entire species, landscapes, territories, and even planets are becoming no longer mere fantasies. But do we really know how to design, to think, to be creative, to be careful, to be responsible, to be innovative, to be progressive both at and between such scales?
