CHANGE BY DESIGN
New expo showcases art and ideas that aim to make you think,
Everyone is destined to come to terms with their own mortality eventually, but a tech designer wants to sober people up early by accounting the days they have left to live.
“I just want them to realize there’s only a certain amount of time and that’s all you get,” Dennis Kavelman said of his aptly titled work Expiry Dates. “It’s about how you choose to allocate a finite resource.”
Participants conduct a lifestyle survey, which quantifies things such as exercise, diet and bad habits. A photograph is taken, then a colour and black and white image is transposed on a screen. Tiny pixels represent days lived and the ones leftover. A Star reporter went through the process and discovered he has about 20,000 days until death, bringing about an epiphany to lay off excessive coffee consumption.
Kavelman said there’s an artistic license behind the figures, so partici- pants shouldn’t put too much stock in them — the bottom-line is to make people think.
This sentiment could be applied to the rest of Expo for Design, Innovation and Technology, which runs from Thursday to Oct. 8 at 21 Don Roadway in East Harbour, showcasing solution-based designs to ameliorate problems around the world.
They fit within the United Nations Development Programme’s Sustainable Development goals, CEO and President Shauna Levy said.
“All of those goals, to me, were design challenges,” she said. “We’ve used them as a framework, in which we’re discussing the idea that design can change the world and make it a better place.”
She compared world fairs from bygone eras as comparable, in the contemporary sense.
“We’re delivering an opportunity to see the future,” she said. “For us, it’s about how we’re going to make it better. These conversations don’t belong in boardrooms, government offices or in designer’s studios. They belong in everybody’s home.”
Indeed, installations throughout four floors of a decommissioned fac- tory explored sustainable agriculture and medical training with 3D printed body parts. One design involved the delivery of blood affixed to drones as a way to expedite travel times to remote communities who are in need.
The first floor is where “Prosperity for All” is located, the main attraction. Large pictures by photojournalist Paolo Pellegrin depict desperate, black and white scenes from around the world; juxtaposed are solution-based designs. This was the precise aim of Bruce Mau, its curator.
“I wanted to help people see the context in which we’re working,” he said. “We’re dealing with the worst challenges.
“We aspired to do a research project to really understand what designers are really doing about it, what they’re doing to help accomplish those goals and confront those problems,” Mau continued, adding that many concepts come from people without conventional design backgrounds.
“They often say, ‘I’m not a designer, I’m a doctor,’ ” he said.
“But in fact, they’re using design methodology to solve problems. For me, it’s a movement.”