Call for Submission: Adhocracy curated by Domus Editor Joseph Grima

Before sharing this announcement, I am hardly working on two audio editings Indeed, the second edition of The Architecture Post The Review will be launched on March 3rd, 2012. Two of CLOG Magazine editors, Julia van Hout and Kyle May, joined me to discuss this newborn magazine.
Friday 2nd March 2012 will be the launch of The Architecture Post Conversation which aim is to discuss with architects, editors, urban planners, engineers, curators, in few words, all the actors that help shape our urban as well as rural lives on a single topic. This will also be the opportunity to discover their work in case you don't know but I am sure this is not the case.
For the first edition, Gian Maurizio, director and curator of La Galerie d'Architecture, Paris as well as architect, will talk over the notion of exhibition in the architectural field, and will go back at Paris-based Jean-Philipe Pargade Architects solo exhibition that just closed its doors.
By the way, on March 15th, 2012: if some of you are in Paris or are planning to go to Paris, save this precious date: Paris-based Périphériques Architects will be on solo show at La Galerie d'Architecture. More soon.
Last important point: although repeating myself, for the moment, the two podcasts will be posted on Urban Lab Global Cities.

This aside, now a call for submission for a project curated by Domus Editor Joseph Grima for the Istanbul Design Biennial: Adhocracy.

Adhocracy is a project curated by Joseph Grima, editor-in-chief of Domus. This project is one of the two exhibitions comprised in the 1st edition of the Istanbul Design Biennial.

Since its inception as a discipline of industrialisation and modernity, design has come to influence — or even define — almost every facet of contemporary existence. From cities to typefaces via architecture, vehicles, objects, interfaces, and infrastructural systems, acts of design permeate our lives almost to the point of saturation. Design has become so ubiquitous as to have almost become invisible, subsumed into everyday life to point we forget it is also inevitably a political activity with far-reaching social implications. Today it stands at one of the most significant crossroads in its brief and conflicted history.

With the advent of the network as the dominant mode of social and cultural organisation, a fundamental shift is to taking place. Design is no longer the domain of a select few creating products of consumption for themany according to the top-down model of Fordist industrialism. It is evolving beyond its definition as the production of immutable objects for mass markets, its geogaphical center shifting away from the West. The convergence of instantaneously shared knowledge, the birth of countless transnational networks, new technologies of production, and a collective impetus towards culture of collaboration instead of competition suggest a new economic and political interpretation of the act of designing.

This new paradigm reveals an incipient role for design as an act of shaping society by enabling self-organisation, producing platforms of exchange, and empowering networks of grass-roots production. The emergence of the open-source movement; the arrival of affordable micro-manufacturing technologies; the explosion of hacker and maker culture; the democratisation of technology through projects like Arduino and participatory platforms such as Kickstarter — all point to an ideological shit away from established conventions of consumerism and the inception of a new understanding of design's role within society, one in which end-users are no longer merely passive consumers but active agents. For the first time, the prospect exists of an equivalency of individuals, and in response, established structures of power are quickly evolving. In many ways, design is now the theatre of a fast-moving conflict over society's future, and the search for a new language of design is the struggle for the establishment of a new, networked commons.

Welcome to the age of Adhocracy. As the opposite of bureaucracy, adhocracy cuts across accepted conventions and power structures to capture opportunities, self-organise and develop new and unexpected methodologies of production. It inhabits the horizontal, rhizomatic realsm of the network, in which innovation — resourceful, subversive, anti-dogmatic, spontaneous — can come from anywhere.
Adhocracy: Call for submissions

• We are looking for projects that empower others to design, self-organise, and collaborate.

• We are looking for projects that destabilise the traditional, balanced, triangular relationship between "designer", "producer" and "consumer".

• We are looking for projects that highlight the political implications of design as a practice.

• We are looking for projects that experiment with innovative methodologies of manufacturing and production.

• We are looking for projects that use design as a form of political activism.

• We are looking for projects that are born from or operate through networks.

• We are looking for projects that propose unorthodox economic models.

• We are looking for projects that push the boundaries of the open-source movement and its implications for everyday life.

• We are looking for projects that combine traditional techniques and know-how with new tools and technologies.

• We are looking for projects that have no author, or too many authors to be counted

• We are looking for projects that are anti-dogmatic.

• We are looking for projects that adapt existing designs to new uses.

• We are looking for projects that challenge the accepted definitions of design.

For submission, registration, and other important information: Here.
The deadline for submissions for the two exhibitions is 2 June 2012.