This is the introduction to the Class of 2019 publication, Everything That Rises: Thinking about Design in Precarious Times. The publication contains essays and excerpts from the students’ thesis research and was an accompaniment to Precarious: The 2019 Graduate Symposium held on May 13, 2019 at the SVA Theatre.

There is possibility in precarity.

The world around us is in flux, teetering on the edge of perpetual change. Definitions are hazy, cultures are liminal. This planet is our home, but perhaps it isn’t habitable anymore? At this critical juncture, we’ve employed design as a lens to see the world.

As design researchers, writers and thinkers in these past nine months, we’ve questioned the meaning of truth, the permanence of nature, the foundation of our identities. This book represents what emerged from our research—the ideas that rose above the precarity of our times.

Hailing from nine different countries spanning four continents, the class of 2019 is global. And, the space in which we thought about design was global, too. We have defined design broadly, examining everything from images and objects to nation states and beyond—even the moon. These subjects behaved like pebbles thrown into a pond, allowing us to trace the far-reaching paths of their waves. And as intriguing as the connections we made across discourse, disciplines and designed objects were, there was a distinctly shared experience of doing this research. The ideas we brought into the studio from our own cultures and experiences, from our field research and interviews and from our readings of cultural theory, educational psychology, and even NASA space logs, come together to form a dynamic, shared bank of knowledge. A lexicon of connected and sometimes overlapping ideas for possible futures that informed our internal discourse, and eventually our writing.

Although we cast our research net far and wide, the contribution made by this shared intellectual existence is inarguable. We’re proud to present the results, in the form of eleven essays by a promising group of design researchers, who looked over the edge of precarity together and found the beauty in everything that rises.

Essays:

Unfolding the Soul by Laura Scofield Cardoso

Partial Fish, Whole Truth by John P. Kazior

Hitting the Ceiling by Natalie Dubois

Porcelain Cigarette Holder by Monica Nelson

Style on The Inside by Emily R. Pellerin

Learning In Situ: The Materiality of Knowledge-Making by Sneha Mehta

Journeying Through Precarity by Jennifer Rittner

The State of Kuwait by Yasmeen Khaja

Research Conversation by Aneta Zeleznikova

On The Design of Interactive Art For Healing by Qiumiao Xu

The Wayfinding Experience Through the Lens Of A City by Olivia Mercado Velasco

Designing Civic Participation by Suchetan Kaashyap