A hopeful meditation on how periods of inactivity become reimagined as
fertile spaces for design and how we might use this strange moment in
history.
Hi, everyone. I'm speaking to you from my apartment in Oakland, though
I've virtually placed myself in the rose garden nearby.
Artist and writer Jenny Odell hadn't originally planned to deliver the
Harvard University Graduate School of Design's 2020 Class Day Address
from her living room. But on May 25, 2020, there was Jenny, framed by a
rose garden in her Zoom background, speaking to an audience she could
not see about the role of design in a suspended moment marked by
uncertainty in a global pandemic. Odell's message, itself a timely
reflection on observation, embraces the standstill and its potential to
deepen and expand our individual and collective attention and
sensitivity to time, place, and presence--in turn, perhaps, enabling us
all, amid our new virtual contexts, to better connect with our natural
and cultural environments.
Odell unspools this hopeful meditation in Inhabiting the Negative
Space, where periods of inactivity become reimagined not as wasted time
but fertile spaces for a kind of design predicated less on relentless
production and more on permitting a deeper, more careful look at what
exactly is demanding or tapping our time and attention, and how we might
use this strange moment in history to respond.
