‘While trying to figure out why WDCD had made things seem so nuanced yet so cohesive, I suddenly remembered – this conference is organised by a bunch of designers’, Elvia Wilk writes in a review of WDCD14 for uncube.
The Berlin-based ‘digital magazine for architecture and beyond’ uncube wants to ‘combine the ease of the internet with the sensibility of print’. We reported earlier on their Construct Africa issue.
Wilk visited both days of What Design Can Do. ‘At its best,’ she writes, ‘WDCD was a dizzying panorama (what a curator might call a “survey show”) of current perspectives within or against or around the profession – and the speaker line-up was frankly impeccable in terms of providing an arc or overview. (Its gender balance is also worth positively remarking upon.) I might never have contemplated Paul Smith’s striped shirts in relation to the work of Tegenlicht or the field of synthetic biology, but their smart juxtaposition forced me to consider what is at stake in their shared space. To ask what design can do today is to ask what design is today – and the invitees were up for the task of interpretation.’
The entire review can be read here