Is Beauty Enough? A Cockpit X Central Saint Martins Symposium 26 – 30 April
We are living in times in which change is accelerating, uncertainty amplified.
We see this in society, the economy, politics, the environment and individual lives. Everything is fluid. Environmental challenge, automisation of jobs, social fragmentation and individual atomization, mass international flows of people, crises in leadership, crises in identity. And more locally, an intensification of the marketisation of education, with particular challenges for art and design education.
Change is nothing new. What is different is our developed consciousness of our own agency and our capability to influence and evolve the world. As designers, makers and creators, we have unprecedented resources, opportunity, time and knowledge to respond to these challenges with creativity and with moral imagination. We have awoken, and yet, sometimes it seems like the potential of design thinking is not yet being harnessed.
In response to the uncertainties which unify our disciplines, from 26 – 30 April, Central Saint Martins and Cockpit will bring together leading practitioners, researchers, policy makers, and educators for an inaugural series of debates, panels and discussions which explore and challenge the value of beauty in making and craft. We will ask how comfortably material practice and object-making sits within our need to radically shift economic, pedagogic and social structures. We will ask who is doing the making. And crucially we will ask, is beauty enough?
The programme of events is online, free and open to all to attend.
Follow this link to find out more details and book your space now.
