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Design Contradictions

Two projects during Melbourne Design Week with collaborators Michael Dunbar and Liam Fennessy to explore connections across. A possible theme: how design simultaneously demands radical honesty about complex futures while maintaining professional facades that obscure the messy realities of practice…

Fabulating More-than-Human Data with AI invited workshop participants to generate synthetic datasets for multispecies urban planning – imagining how cities might account for spider negotiations, fungal networks, and seasonal migrations. Using prompt engineering, designers stretched beyond human-centered metrics to ask: “What data isn’t there, and whose perspectives are systematically excluded?” https://designweek.melbourne/event/fabulating-more-than-human-data-with-ai/

Whilst using Gen-AI to fabulate may sound frivolous to some readers (or irresponsible), we found that a complexity grew as the AI prompts didn’t just generate alternative data – they revealed assumptions embedded in existing datasets, forcing questions about who sets standards and whose futures get foreclosed.

A particular favourite was Madelaine Thomas ’ exploration of fungus conversations leading to an impenetrable speculative language – see video:

Meanwhile, Design. Regret. Confess. operated from a Japanese Kei truck, collecting anonymous confessions from Melbourne’s design community. The results were devastating in their honesty: “I don’t understand design anymore,” “I grimace every time I hear design can change the world,” “I purposely make worse work for clients who misgender me.” https://designweek.melbourne/event/design-regret-confess/

Between moments of spectacular failure (“forgot there are windows on the tram”) and ethical compromise (“I worked for a consultancy supporting warfare activities”), a pattern emerged: practitioners desperate for spaces to acknowledge what our polished portfolios systematically erase.

Do keep adding… https://designregretconfess.com/

The Contradiction of Professional Imagination…
The synthetic data workshop asked participants to imagine radically inclusive futures while the confession van revealed how current practice systematically excludes, compromises, and fails. We can fabulate multispecies datasets but struggle to create professional cultures that acknowledge our own limitations.

Perhaps the contradiction isn’t a problem to solve but a productive tension to maintain. The same imagination that can fabulate fungal urban planning can also acknowledge the coal mine uncle, the copied logo, the compromised ethics.

The question isn’t whether design can change the world, but whether we can practice with enough honesty about our limitations to change anything at all.

Thanks to National Gallery of Victoria, Nina Gibbes, Madelaine Thomas, Leyla Acaroglu Brad Haylock RMIT College of Design and Social Context
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