While I was in Munich a few weeks ago, I got the
chance to visit the Utopia Station Poster Project at Haus der Kunst. The promise
of Utopia (literally, a ‘no-place’ or the dream of a peaceful and just world) is
the starting point for this international project that began at the Venice
Biennale in June 2003. UTOPIA STATION includes the work of more than sixty
contemporary artists and groups and runs until November 30th.

One of
the groups involved is Massive
Change, an international project on the future of design culture. Between
now and 2006, Massive Change will take the form of an international exhibition,
a book, public events, a radio program, an online forum and a film project.
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Their posters really impressed me… here are two quotes from their
website, massivechange.com

/>“For many of us, design is invisible. We live in a world that is so thoroughly
configured by human effort that design has become second nature, ever-present,
inevitable, taken for granted…

And yet, the power of design to
transform and affect every aspect of daily life is gaining widespread public
awareness. No longer associated simply with objects and appearances, design is
increasingly understood in a much wider sense as the human capacity to plan and
produce desired outcomes.

Design has emerged as one of the world’s
most powerful forces. It has placed us at the beginning of a new, unprecedented
period of human possibility, where all economies and ecologies are becoming
global, relational, and interconnected.

In order to understand these
emerging forces, there is an urgent need to articulate precisely what we are
doing to ourselves and to our world. This is the ambition of Massive Change.”
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“Design, the human capacity to plan and produce desired
outcomes, has placed us at the beginning of a new, unprecedented period of human
possibility, where all economies and ecologies are becoming global, relational,
and interconnected.

Nature is no longer a realm outside of our
manipulation. We need to evolve a global society that has the capacity to direct
and control the emerging forces in order to achieve the most positive
outcome.

We must ask ourselves, now that we can do anything, what
will we do?”
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