About the Exhibiton

This exhibition is organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art & Design, Interim Director of Exhibitions Nikki Rayburn, and Guest Curators Margo Halverson, Emily Luce, Gabrielle Esperdy, and Denise Gonzales Crisp.

DesignInquiry is a non-profit educational organization that explores pressing issues in design and culture. We are a collective of thinkers and makers devoted to extra-disciplinary exchange. For more than a decade DesignInquiry has spearheaded intensive team-based gatherings and shared the diverse outcomes and publications, influenced design research and teaching methods, and has inspired professional designers to rethink what design can be and can do.

We do our best work when we’re together and everything is a project. These are on page one of DesignInquiry’s operating manual. With invitations to different minds, different practices, and different approaches, DesignInquiry: Futurespective will reveal processes of design with collaborative hands-on and on-site making, curating, and exhibiting of selected work using the topic of currency (understood as value) as a prompt for a myriad of design interpretations throughout the duration of the exhibition.

DesignInquiry: Futurespective is a series of installations that demonstrate how DesignInquiry engages in open-ended extra-disciplinary exchange. On display in the galleries are multi-media installations of objects + projects that present the experience of DesignInquiry as a real-time gathering and explore the process of DesignInquiry as a collective practice of thinking and making.

Futurespective demonstrates how our practices unfold in design and everywhere. These practices are as diverse as the Inquirers themselves: we draw, write, weave, and cook; we discuss, debate, and document. Through these practices, which are conceptual as well as material, we query the way design informs culture and culture informs design.

Events, visiting artists, and designers-in-residence will intersect with MECA&D faculty, students and the Portland community. DesignInquiry: Futurespective is an invitation to witness and participate in an active design lab with the goal to make evident that while a design process may appear unfinished, unplanned, and unknown, the outcomes can surprise in productive ways that reframe initial expectations of success.