Precarity Pilot Leeds

A monthly “strategising” group for making socially and politically engaged practices resilient.

WHAT
A series of 12 monthly workshops – each of 2.5 hours – on how to develop and sustain your own socially and politically engaged design practice.

WHEN
From February 2015 to February 2016 (with a summer break).
2nd Thursday of the month – 5pm to 7.30pm
Starting on 12 February 2015 at Leeds College of Art (Blenheim Walk)

FOR WHOM
For up to 10 socially and politically engaged design students and recent graduates – working on their own or collectively. For practitioners who want to change and/or expand the position and modes of intervention of designers in society.

WHY
As publications such as Design Activism, Design as Politics and Adversarial Design show, design that wants to contribute to positive eco-social transformations has become a frame of reference for many contemporary practitioners. But no real strategies have yet been developed for sustaining such practices in the long-run outside the protective and encouraging environment of academia.
In fact, low pay and unstable working conditions are a reality for the majority of designers and so it is about time to generate inventive ways to nurture transformative design practice.

PART OF PRECARITY PILOT
The workshops are part of Precarity Pilot, this online platform and a series of Europe-wide nomadic workshops developed by Brave New Alps and Caterina Giuliani.
The workshop series in Leeds is unique as it will develop over a one-year period, thus allowing for more substantial collective strategising.
The workshops will be facilitated by Bianca Elzenbaumer and Fabio Franz of Brave New Alps. They work together as a collective since 2005 and develop projects that treat social, environmental and political issues. For more info, see www.brave-new-alps.com/about

METHODOLOGY
The workshops will develop around the experiences, knowledges, desires and needs that participants bring to them. For the initial three workshops Brave New Alps will propose the topics. The plan is however that once the group starts to form, decisions on the topics/issues/concerns/methodologies to be explored in the following sessions will be taken together.
Besides generating knowledge collectively and coming up with tactics and strategies for each participant’s practice, we also aim to generate knowledge that can be fed back into the Precarity Pilot website to be shared with designers in other places.

WHERE
Different cultural spaces around Leeds.

NOTE
The workshops will go ahead if a minimum of six people get together.

WANT TO KNOW MORE?
Meet us for an informal chat before signing up: on Friday, 6 February between 5pm and 7pm at the Victoria Pub, 28 Great George Street, Leeds. Look out for a Precarity Pilot poster and you’ll find us.

TO SIGN UP
E-mail us 100 words about you and your practice at:
info (at) precaritypilot (dot) net
(by Monday, 9th February 2015)