DesignInquiry 2010

DesignInquiry Spring 2010: BeingHERE March 11-14, 2010, Marfa, TX Our first 4-day Spring Inquiry is to be held in the high desert town of Marfa, in far west Texas. With mesquite, cacti, tumbleweed, and pristine mountain air, Marfa has a spare and sublime atmosphere that literally suggests a site-specific creativity. BeingHERE is an opportunity to explore an approach to design that is contemplative and reactive, a design that does not prescribe or impose formulas but responds to the conditions that surrounds it. DesignInquiry is a non-profit educational organization devoted to researching design issues in-based gatherings. It brings together practitioners from disparate fields to generate new work and ideas around a single topic. For more information, visit http://designinquiry.net - DesignInquiry Summer 2010: JOY June 20-25 2010, Vinalhaven Maine "Surely joy is the condition of life." - Henry David Thoreau, philosopher (1842) "The absence of joy is the biggest threat to our society." - Will Alsop, architect (2003) Does design create or embody joy, or does it merely create conditions for joy to emerge? Is there joy in the designed artifact or in the act of design? Is a designer's joy the same as a user's joy? What is the relationship between joy and play and how might design conjoin the two? What might a taxonomy of joy look like? DesignInquiry is a non-profit educational organization devoted to researching design issues in-based gatherings. It brings together practitioners from disparate fields to generate new work and ideas around a single topic. For more information, visit http://designinquiry.net