In times when human activities violently constrict the lives of others, how can designers cultivate creative acts of withdrawal, foreclosure and leaving be? Erik Sandelin employs ‘grace’ – actively not doing what you are able to do – to decouple action from force and passivity from resignation in design. This understanding of grace informs a series of design experiments that variously draw on and explore design withdrawal alongside the work of Michel Serres, Patricia MacCormack, Simone Weil and Critical Animal Studies.
The Design Societies Research Unit (DSRU) would like to invite you to the upcoming Design and Grace event, featuring Erik Sandelin, at the Department of Design, Goldsmiths, University of London.
Wednesday 5th March 2025
Doctoral Masterclass: 11:00 – 13:00hrs | Hexagon, Lockwood Building 211
Seminar: 16:00 – 18:00hrs | Richard Hoggart Building (RHB) 221
The event is organised into two parts.
- Between 11am and 1pm Erik will lead a Doctoral Masterclass with MPhil/PhD students at Goldsmiths where we will discuss how his work involves theoretically driven practice-based research.
- In the afternoon, between 4pm and 6pm, Erik will present his work in a seminar format, followed by discussion led by Alex Wilkie and chaired by Sarah Pennington.
Please note: you are more than welcome to attend either session depending on what’s convenient for you.
Lures for Feeling seminar series
Design and Grace is part of the Lures for Feeling seminar series that explores the climate crisis as an aesthetic event marked by an irretrievable loss of feeling and being, challenging design and knowledge practices to address cosmopolitical futures. The series invites scholars and practitioners to engage with more-than-human aesthetics, fostering sensitivity to climatic possibilities and liveable futures where nonhuman others play an active role. By questioning assumptions and unsettling design practices, the series seeks to imagine transformative, yet modest, roles for design in hopeful, ethico-political world-making.