Designing Everyday Life

BIO 50 breaks with the traditional system of awards, choosing instead to award collaboration, its process and outcomes. Recognizing the idea that design is a discipline that permeates all layers of contemporary life, BIO launches an unprecedented effort to engage designers and agents from Slovenia and abroad in a collaborative approach that will address themes that affect everyday life. Guided by a group of mentors from various disciplines, eleven teams have tackled the topics

Affordable Living

Knowing Food

Public Water, Public Space

Walking the City

Hidden Crafts

The Fashion System

Hacking Households

Nanotourism

Engine Blocks

Observing Space

Designing Life

Each team has created specific projects that are developed and implemented during the Biennial.

Drawing from the complex network generated around BIO 50, Designing Everyday Life serves as a reader, compiling written and visual material on the many layers that compose the biennial. Notes, essays, and interviews, along with sketches, photographs, and diagrams, are aggregating the manifold dimensions of each team’s collaborative work process, and illuminate strategies and roles for design in a contemporary world.

An opening section introduces the topics discussed throughout the different components of the publication, arguing new priorities for the design discipline in contemporary times. Essays and visual material come together to articulate new roles for a discipline that has changed beyond the universe of mass-made products and solutions, and instead inhabits a fundamentally new universe in a series of small-scale, customized scenarios. Exploring the changing definition of design will illuminate its possible future.

The concluding chapter reflects on the history and legacy of the world’s oldest design event. It uses the history of BIO as an opportunity to explore changes in the last fifty years within the design discipline, western society and everyday life. With contributions by Slovenian and international experts, a series of reflections on BIO as a meeting point for design between East and West in Central Europe allow to extrapolate conclusions about European design in the immediate future.

Designing Everyday Life also features interviews with Alice Rawsthorn, design critic at New York Times, Konstantin Grcic, industrial designer, and Sasa Machtig, industrial designer.

MAO co-produces Designing Everyday Life with Z33, a space for contemporary art based in the Belgian city of Hasselt. Since 2002, Z33 has been realizing projects and exhibitions that encourage visitors to see everyday things in a new way.http://www.z33.be/en/z33/mission