LUNCH 14: Frontier

The promised land lies just over the horizon; that’s what we told ourselves. This great unknown, the frontier, has taken many forms throughout history: the silk road, the wild west, the space race, the human genome project. Anywhere unknown was hostile, yet full of promise. That romantic notion of the frontier persists, but the undiscovered open land, waiting to be claimed – it’s already discovered, already occupied. The frontier of the past doesn’t care – its skies are wide and its memory narrow. The frontier of John Wayne, Lewis and Clark, Philip Johnson, the narrative of the heroic individual, is impotent in the context of the contemporary world. Without accepting a multiplicity of perspectives and methods to ease us back from the edge of impending crisis, we are the Donner Party.

The old frontier, that line drawn in the sand, has exploded into a plethora of new and multiplying fronts. They are not only geographical but technological and epistemological. Now as ever though, progress is not synonymous with good, society cannot be measured by the novelty of our ideas. Designers are in a unique position to determine our own frontiers, to find and cross our own edges between what is and what can be, or to reject the concept of frontiers altogether. We are confronted at these increasingly indeterminate crossroads by great unknowns and must invent ways forward, both new and reimagined. The simultaneous outcomes of these small contestations will determine the future – not one man riding into the sunset.

Lunch 14 invites you to Venture into this wild future, to unearth what has been forgotten, to include what has been excluded, to add your vision for what comes next and how to get there. Define your edge and the project that can push past it, critique a design practice or propose an entirely new structure for practice, tell us where you see the current limits of the field and what lies just beyond them – or submit something else entirely.

Deadline for Abstracts:
November 28, 2018
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