Review and Reflect
Imaginary Futures for Healing: How to Support Female-Centered NGOs with Speculative Design Tools
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Janka Csernák
This paper examines the critical role of female advocacy NGOs in adopting social and speculative design approaches to enhance the well-being of both their employees and target groups. While female advocacy organizations have long championed gender equity, their strategies often mirror conventional models, which may limit their potential for transformative change. Drawing on the frameworks of social design, which prioritizes human-centered, participatory approaches (Raquel et al., 2023), and speculative design, which explores alternative futures to challenge the status quo (Nandan, 2020), this experimental research explores how these design methodologies can offer powerful tools for NGOs to innovate their practices and create more inclusive, equitable work environments. The study posits that these approaches foster more positive futuring within the organizations as well as through case work with the target group. By integrating speculative design, NGOs can envision imagery and narratives that address both client needs and systemic inequities affecting their employees, such as burnout, while also developing more resilient strategies to support their target groups. Moreover, social design empowers NGOs to co-create modes of operation with different stakeholders from various sectors (Storer et al, 2023) as well as other organizations with a similar focus, promoting a culture of shared responsibility and mutual care. This paper also highlights the potential positive feedback loop, where improved employee well-being translates to more effective advocacy, benefiting the target groups.
Michael Hussar - White: A Decade 1999-2009: "He Dared to Speak Apove a Whisper"
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Robert Tracy
Driven by love, hate, sin, redemption and death, Michael Hussar’s portraits from the white series 1999-2009 presents the viewer with a contextual white noise of daily life. Immaturity that is both confrontational and evocative. Hussar describes his work as a voyeuristic snapshot of perceived humanity, complete with freaks and fakery; a gothic wonderland illuminating the gray area between truths and lies. Hussar’s attachment to his paintings runs deep; each piece is a journal of sorts, announcing its three-dimensionaliity allowing him to come face to face with his demons and exorcising them with each new stroke of the brush. Hussar’s paintings are in the private collections of Warren Beatty, Francis Ford Coppola, Leonardo di Caprio, and Rogie Vachon. My research addresses the artist’s willingness to engage his viewer with the reality that nothing can be changed until it is faced through text, video, and music. The challenge for hussar is in the moment; and the time is always now! The old traditions of portraiture are bankrupt.
Interpretive Meaning Making: The Non-curated Experience of Art
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Shweta Kushal, Mukta Mani Bhadola
Art is ubiquitous with its presence in public transit systems and doyens of high culture like carefully-curated museum exhibits. In this ever-expanding and continually-underwritten world of art reality and consumption, this study focuses on the presence of artworks in hotel lobbies. Situated squarely in the realm of premium hotels and their décor, the study has three research objectives: a) Understanding the purpose of recognisable celebrated artworks in these luxury spaces; b) Understanding the impact of art on patrons’ experience; c) Studying the meaning making experience when unmediated by commentaries and guidelines. The researchers studied premium hotels in New Delhi, India to analyse the relationship between art and the non-artist, non-critic viewer, in the absence of curated museum documentations and gallery mediated narratives. Since premium hotels continue to display high art canvases by celebrated Indian artists such as M. F. Hussain and Satish Gujral, this space is ideal. With a qualitative research design including FGDs and in-depth semi-structured interviews, the study focuses on narratives of patrons and employees to understand the democratisation of art. It employs narrative research and documents how presence and experience of art impacts members who engage with it. The data are analysed through narrative enquiry, inductive pattern analysis, and stitching together of narrative. The outcomes are expected to generate insights and consequently demonstrate the impact of the study. The study hopes to provide novel insights on democratised and accessible art and the manner in which it enriches the human experience of large public spaces.
