Friday 28 October // 15:00 // Auditorium

“The Limits of Control” is a body of work exploring the creative networks between designers and their collaborators — human and nonhuman. Inspired by the work/writing of James Bridle, Cage and Latour the work examines how the interplay of control and trust in a designer’s relationship with their network of tools (creative, cultural, technological) can be attended to, challenged, and reimagined allows us to break free of the traditional modes and methodologies and begin to explore new possibilities and new ways of seeing and being as designers. AI/ML/LLM have put these questions in a spotlight and allow a place to ask questions of our assumed roles and goals. They allow us to give agency and voice to our tools that can help to clarify and expand our ideas and roles. The black boxes which envelop our tools (traditional and emerging) obscure the complexity and scale of the collaborative space we already work in. This work makes the invisible visible and removes the designer from their imagined directive podium to be one among many in a creative and collaborative network of active participants full of agency and potential. Showcasing case studies that demonstrate the tools of a creative network foregrounds their active participation in co-creation. New tools are created in which the agency of the tool itself is highlighted. These strange tools and projects undertake an intentionally nonhierarchical mode of making, decentering the designer’s role. Each study pushes the designer further away from a mode of control with the intent of asking—if there is collaborative care, respect, and trust in the creative process then what new solutions, what new insights, what new ways of thinking and being may we discover when we look around from our new perspective and to what new collaborations are possible.