OPEN CALL for Adhocracy
Adhocracy, curated by Joseph Grima, is one of the two exhibitions comprised in the 1st edition of the Istanbul Design Biennial

Since its inception as a discipline of industrialisation and modernity, design has come to influence—or even define—almost every facet of contemporary existence. From cities to typefaces via architecture, vehicles, objects, interfaces, and infrastructural systems, acts of design permeate our lives almost to the point of saturation. Design has become so ubiquitous as to have almost become invisible, subsumed into everyday life to the point we forget it is also inevitably a political activity with far-reaching social implications. Today, it stands at one of the most significant crossroads in its brief and conflicted history.

With the advent of the network as the dominant mode of social and cultural organisation, a fundamental shift is taking place. Design is no longer the domain of a select few creating products of consumption for the many according to the top-down model of Fordist industrialism. It is evolving beyond its definition as the production of immutable objects for mass markets, its geographical center shifting away from the West. The convergence of instantaneously shared knowledge, the birth of countless transnational networks, new technologies of production, and a collective impetus towards a culture of collaboration instead of competition suggest a new economic and political interpretation of the act of designing.

This new paradigm reveals an incipient role for design as an act of shaping society by enabling self-organisation, producing platforms of exchange, and empowering networks of grass-roots production. The emergence of the open-source movement; the arrival of affordable micro-manufacturing technologies; the explosion of hacker and maker culture; the democratisation of technology through projects like Arduino and participatory platforms such as Kickstarter—all point to an ideological shift away from established conventions of consumerism and the inception of a new understanding of design’s role within society, one in which end-users are no longer merely passive consumers but active agents. For the first time, the prospect exists of an equivalency of influence between the strategies of states or corporations and the tactics of individuals, and in response, established structures of power are quickly evolving. In many ways, design is now the theatre of a fast-moving conflict over society’s future, and the search for a new language of design is the struggle for the establishment of a new, networked commons.

Welcome to the age of adhocracy. As the opposite of bureaucracy, adhocracy cuts across accepted conventions and power structures to capture opportunities, self-organise and develop new and unexpected methodologies of production. It inhabits the horizontal, rhizomatic realm of the network, in which innovation—resourceful, subversive, anti-dogmatic, spontaneous—can come from anywhere.