Wild design and its activism in everyday urban life

Abstract

This research posits non-professional design as the arena where wild design and its activism in everyday urban life is identified, and investigates the do-it-yourself creativities undertaken by socio-economically and culturally marginalised urbanites in China. Two questions pertain to the research: how does wild design praxis work with time and space? how do wild design agencies challenge/negotiate with the larger-scale infrastructural system? This research sets out to refer to visual archives established by artists Michael Wolf, Bill Aitchison, Huang Heshan, and Chu Jini; conducts fieldworks and interviews; and analyses empirical evidence through taxonomies and case study approaches. Drawing upon the theories of Michel De Certeau’s ‘la perruque’, and Henri Lefebvre’s tripartite production of social space, the article argues that by growing wildly beyond the binaries between the planned and the unplanned, the stable and the variable, the formal and the informal, wild design offers a lived reference to non-professional design agencies.

Keywords:

• Do-it-yourself (DIY)
• make-do-and-mend
• everyday resistance
• infrastructure
• socio-material structure
• design activism

Consent for publication

Written informed consent for publication was obtained from all interviewees.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Flow is described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (2008, 55, 74) as a form of play that results from a merging of action which occurs when the participant is challenged but not overwhelmed by the activity.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yaxi Liu

Yaxi Liu is a researcher and curatorial coordinator of the National Museum of China, where she investigates the history of material culture and modern design. Prior to joining the National Museum of China, she studied interior architecture at University of the Arts London, Tsinghua University, and North China University of Technology in Beijing. She has been bestowed the Emerging Scholar Award by the Common Ground Research Networks, 2018, and the Emerging Creative Practitioner Fund by China Scholarship Council, 2013.