Taking a Line for a Walk. An Exhibition About Assignments in Design Education

Passed along, replicated, adapted, evolved over time, assignments are as much informed by methodologies and the history of design education as they are figments of the teacher's present, thought up, written down, dreamt up, jotted down. Objects and books may assist their teaching, and their outcome may most often be visual, but assignments are essentially language. The teacher as author. They lay out rules, give instructions, present a problem, describe an exercise, entice an activity, propose a game, stimulate a process, or throw up questions. Like riddles, they elicit thinking and ask for solutions, while indirectly defining and formulating ideas about design. This exhibition investigates the ways and lines of instructing design and invites you to explore its rooms. Walk your own line. Look, play, listen, read, think.

Conceived by Nina Paim (BR), designed in collaboration with Emilia Bergmark (SE), with texts by Corinne Gisel (CH), featuring works by students from the Basel School of Design (CH), FBAUL in Lisbon (PT), the Estonian Academy of the Arts in Tallinn (EE), and the Brno University of Technology (CZ).

This exhibition was commissioned in the form of an assignment, given by the curators of the 26th Brno Biennial 2014.