Design for the Unthinkable World was a group show at KORA – Contemporary Arts Center at Castrignano de Greci, Lecce, Italy, curated by Paul Rodgers, Craig Bremner and Giovanni Innella. The project was born from a series of dialogues started several years ago between the curators and six selected studios from around the world: Ani Liu, delaO design studio, Guy Keulemans & Kyoko Hashimoto, mischer’traxler, SulSolSal and Parsons & Charlesworth.

The curators positioned the exhibition thus:
“This project, through a series of critical contributions from six leading design practitioners/ researchers, will contest that if design’s raison d’être is to make things better, then the object of design has always been, remains and can only be a changed world and our relationship to it – the world-for- us. While once upon a time this might have been seen to be a worthy objective, now the role of designing must cease to service design for change in the manner in which it has been doing. We asked the designers to avoid the growing attraction to apocalyptic predictions and to explore how to design for the unthinkable-world…keeping in mind its inescapable key words “possible” and “future”.

Our response to the project theme developed into a new body of work (Multispecies Inc.) focused upon design for non-human species. At the exhibition we exhibited new works include an educational toy building and three pencil drawing tableaux capturing interactions among individuals, non-human life forms, objects and systems as a means to speculate on the potential redefinition of interspecies relations. The first three drawings shown at KORA are The Algae Kin-Gatherer, The Nomadic Fog Collector and the Redwoods Fog Distributor.