THE CIRCUIT
Talk with Hannah Ellis and Silvio Lorusso

It starts with a question, perhaps a passing interest. Design takes over a city, with clutters of exhibitions in galleries and disused spaces working loosely in response. New biennials and festivals and weeks emerge every year. Old events happen again simply because they happened before. What is it that these events and their predictable patterns actually achieve, though?
For almost 200 years, continuing a line of thought first started by events like the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations (1851), “design events” have become more and more popular across Europe, tangling around local, national, and international politics and economics. But can design be important or meaningful at this kind of scale? And how do these events act on people and places – as well as on the discipline itself? With the pause that the pandemic offers, is this the moment to examine who and what they exclude, taking the time to imagine what they could be instead?

Interdisciplinary research programme, with contributions by researchers in art, architecture and design, grounded on transformation and politics in partnership with COW – Center for Other Worlds, Center for Research in Design and Art based at Universidade Lusófona, Lisbon.

Hannah Ellis is a designer, writer, researcher, and educator based in the UK. She is a Senior Lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University and author of Design Capital #1: The Circuit (Onomatopee, 2021).

Silvio Lorusso is an Assistant Professor and Vice-director of the Centre for Other Worlds at Lusófona University in Lisbon, a creative coding tutor at the Royal Academy of Art in Den Haag and a lecturer at the Design Department of the Sandberg Institute. He is a member of Varia, the Centre for Everyday Technology, as well as part of the editorial board of Italian graphic design magazine Progetto Grafico. He has written for several magazines and publications, including Volume, Real Life Magazine, Not, Modes of Criticism. In 2018 he published his first book entitled Entreprecariat (Onomatopee).