The Design of What? Tentative Approach to Parreno’s Life Forms

This lecture addresses a subterranean – at once ubiquitous and discreet – design thinking that seems to inform the work of Philippe Parreno. Related to a wide variety of phenomena – from architectural construction to the operation of media technologies to the realm of biological life forms – design comes across as an effect of non-coordinated collective actions rather than the work of any one, central agent. In this context, design thinking might above all be understood as the project info for a social reality animated by an unruly composite of sentient beings, indicating the inherently messy shaping of things to come.