Pivot 2021: Dismantling/reassembling — Tools for alternative futures (Jul 2021, Online)

Dates: 22-23 July 2021
Location: Online
Contact: pivot2021toronto@gmail.com
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 5 April 2021

The Pluriversal Design Special Interest Group of the Design Research Society (DRS) and the Public Visualization Lab of OCAD University invite you to discuss decoloniality and societal transformation. Pivot 2021 aims to identify tools and practices of dismantling and reassembling that could favor ways of reshaping human presence on Earth, as well as concrete cases of alternative future-making from all around the world.

By tools, we refer to not only artifacts but also to services, symbols, rules, institutions, policies, pedagogies, systems, environments, and so on (Illich 1975). Briefly, tools constitute aspects of social life that we deliberately create to (re)shape the tangible reality.

As the world faces multiple colossal, interconnecting crises—COVID-19, social unrest around our fragile sphere of Earth, climate crisis, plastic pollution, deforestation, ravaging wildfires, the frightening spread of authoritarianism, and so on—there is an increasing awareness that the Western civilizational model and ways of life have reached a crossroads. What is currently asked from humanity is more than damage reduction, but a profound societal transformation: reconceiving cultural and economic models and changing our ways of being, thinking, learning, making, relating, and so on.

The Pivot 2021 theme focuses on the tools that we might design and use to dismantle the structures of the current civilizational model (aka patriarchal capitalist Modernity) and to reassemble the debris into new models, converting debris into the nurturing humus for worlds in the making.

CONFERENCE FORMAT

PIVOT 2021 will be a virtual conference that takes place on Zoom (July 22-23, 2021). Each day will feature two keynotes and several panels exploring different themes.

The panels will be composed of Presenters (who apply to Pivot 2021 and go through peer-review) and Invited Speakers from the Global South and racialized minorities. Each author will present a 3-10 minute pre-recorded video followed by a live discussion with the audience. The Invited Speakers will act like discussants and help us create bridges between different worlds and perspectives.

HOW TO PARTICIPATE

We invite interested designers, artists, scholars, and changemakers to submit a long abstract (700-1000 words) by April 5, 2021.

Send us two PDFs (one with your name and affiliation and one fully anonymized).

Further details (themes, timetable, etc.) are available here.

Please submit your abstracts by email to: pivot2021toronto@gmail.com.