The NCSU College of Design Biennial Graduate Symposium is only a week and a half away and we are pumped!
From the built environment to the virtual realm of interface, design persuades individuals and communities of the truth, honesty, and realness of objects, spaces, and systems. These tactics of persuasion amount to what may be called a rhetoric of authenticity.
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Though designers employ this rhetoric, communities ultimately decide what is authentic to them. Design anthropologist Dori Tunstall describes five requisites of communities: commonality in terms of historic consciousness, life goals, organizational structures, relationships, and conceptions of individual agency. Can considering how the rhetoric of authenticity relates to these defining characteristics of communities help identify points of engagement with complex and discriminating audiences?
This symposium will explore the rhetoric of authenticity within design practices and for community experience. We will confront provocative issues relating to designers’ roles and responsibilities to communities and the individuals who comprise them. Join us in this dialogue.
+ How can we anticipate the ways in which our designs will be read by community members?
+ How can we design to empower community audiences in ways that increase their agency and nurture their identities?
+ What does it mean to appreciate the power of the rhetoric of authenticity in our design practices and considerations of community?
+ How might social, political, and economic constructs influence perceptions of authenticity in design?
+ What constitutes authentic experience, relative to design?
