'Rehearsing Refusal' by 2nd and 3rd year students
Design Research students are hosting an exhibition at Paradise on 5 December! Please join us for performances, music, reading and drinks from 17h onwards.
Over the course of one semester, seventeen Design Research students explore practices of Rehearsing Refusal. Refusal, some argue, is the strongest act of resistance against capitalism by essentially refusing to be useful to it. Refusal as a practice does not mean to literally withdraw from “doing” —to strip life from all its activity— but, rather, to find both power and pleasure in a “NO,” as precursor for rethinking what we consider productive, efficient, and convenient within the destructive value systems that make up the world we inhabit.
In design, we are often trained to solve problems, optimise, make efficient and respond to briefs. But what happens when the most responsible act is to refuse? Refusal in design is not a failure to act, it is a conscious decision to design outside of harmful systems, exploitative ideologies, or unsustainable exhaustive models.
In this exhibition students design against individualisation and for collective action; critically examine mass-media infrastructure, explore open source tools in favor of DIY repair practice or local materials; refuse mass extraction of resources in relation to artistic and design production, study the ramifications of mass unemployment or, satirise the commodification of activist consumer goods.
Design Research is a specialisation studio for second and third year students of the Graphic Design Department and is guided by Marthe Prins.
Participating students
Olin Bikker
Sam van den Broeke
Keren Ehrli Schmidt
Prem Dai Hoogenveen
Julie Laures
Stan van der Made
Julia Nijgh
Pola Pietrzak
Alexandr Prikhodko
Ana Rašević
Cosima Rieger
Patricia Scurtu
Sten Struik
Thaqif Nazri
Yicheng Yuan
Nastya Zaremba
Luca Ricard
