Bruce M. Tharp: Carnegie Mellon Panel on Discursive Design

On Thursday, November 10, Stamps Associate Professor Bruce M. Tharp took part in a panel discussion at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Design. Concurrent with a discursive design exhibit, Climactic: Post-Normal Design, Tharp, along with Maria Lamadrid, Anne Burdick, and Marti Louw, reflected on the work itself as well as issues surrounding the dissemination of the work’s ideas. The title of the panel discussion, Where’s Mr. Debate?: Assembling Publics, invokes a criticism of the field of discursive design about its claims of raising substantive topics for public engagement. 

The exhibition, which runs through December 11, 2016, makes an important contribution to the field as it consciously includes work from across the globe, giving voice to many who do not often enter into mainstream design media. Curators Katherine Moline, Ahmed Ansari, and Deepa Butoliya ​“aim to present alternative models for design that broaden human capacity to understand and intervene in accelerated social and environmental crises.” 

Bruce M. Tharp, along with his wife and fellow Stamps faculty member, Stephanie Tharp, are leading voices from the United States on the topic of discursive design. 

CLIMACTIC: POST NORMAL DESIGN | Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University