The Design of Trade: extractivism & material flows

Expanding on 'The Design of Trade', a lecture series I curated a few years ago, I developed this theme as a seminar for the Design department at ZHdK.

As we rediscover materialities in a digital world, we are confronted with a growing need to understand how things are made, where they come from, which knowledge, legacies, and traditions are embedded in them, and how those things are transported, discarded, and recycled by whom, and where, etc. These questions tie with a general concern for environmental impacts of consumerism and waste, and the human rights entangled with them. The very finite materials that are being mined in remote locations by exploited labor demonstrate the extension to which extractivism damages local ecosystems and cultural heritage.

These notions of material flows through geography, history, trade agreements, mining of indigenous resources, migrations are now crucial to grasp for a study of making, craft and fabrication.

This seminar aims to tie the larger socio-economic context of material sourcing and transformation together with practices of fabrication.

In this course, a range of aspects are touched upon as parts of a systemic perspective:

• Trade routes & supply chains (geopolitics of extractivism)
• Materials and mining
• Exploitation of labour and resource extraction
• Commodifying animal life and ecosystems
• Entanglements with design and consumer society: tensions and contradictions of values / Disconnections between raw value - end price, between resources -  processes of transformation & fabrication - end products
• Emergence of Empires (conglomerates & nations both)
• Trafficking
• Systems & Infrastructures
• Global exchange of materials and techniques
• Innovation and development / cultural exchanges
• Environmental and social consequences
• Indigenous viewpoints
• Trade agreements and trade wars
• Swiss context