Fostering participation and critical thinking, the Open Talks follow the exciting format of television debates. A Talk Host chooses the topic, invites the guests and moderates the discussion with the Agents Provocateurs, a mix of creative practitioners, journalists and academics. The floor is then opened to comments from the audience.

The Open Talks are a favorite among students, professionals and opinion-makers, giving them an opportunity to engage well-known international agents in a lively exchange on vital issues of contemporary culture and creative work.

09.09.09  11:00-13:00

Our lives are guided by the fictions we believe in. Our personal memory is organized as a story. The history/story of the world is the result of intertwining stories, narratives and moments.

What is changing in the way we tell stories? How are contemporary stories being told? What narratives are there in a time of snapshots and episodes, of simultaneousness and random connections?

After film, television, Internet, youtube and social networks, how is fiction being imagined, written and filmed? How is it programmed? Is the concept of fiction design relevant? What fictions will be imprinted onto and shape the indistinct chaos of contemporary media? What new mythologies will preside over it?

10.09.09  11:00-13:00

A better future, by design: The considerable environmental cost of development , and the attendant climate change consequences, means that in order to save the planet we have to almost re-design it from the ground up – and this will affect the buildings we inhabit, the cars we drive and the industrial processes our companies engage in.

In fact, over the next 40 years, we will have to develop a World 2.0 – a fundamental over-arching movement to reshape the world– and this would place design as one of the most important disciplines in business and Academia – coupled with a green consciousness. And so, innovators are in hurry to fast-track World 2.0. Witness the advent of the X-Prize – which has put up a $10 million award to the innovator that develops the first commercially viable 100 mile per gallon car! Incremental change is not good enough for these guys – they want radical, frame-breaking change that could change the course of the planet over the next few decades.

Ravi Naidoo

11.09.09  11:00-13:00

Designers stand between revolutions and everyday life. They have the ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and social mores, and to convert them into objects and ideas that people can actually understand and use.

What they produce can sometimes resemble conceptual art or scientific experiment, but what all their endeavors share is a passion for interdisciplinarity and innovation, as well as an attention to the common good that makes them into crucial actors in the future of society and of the world.

Paola Antonelli

12.09.09  11:00-13:00

We are living at a time of unprecedented change. Advances in science and technology are accelerating. The environmental crisis is deepening. The social and political systems that ran society in the 2oth century are breaking down. Our lives are dramatically different to ten years ago, and will be as different again ten years from now. Some of these changes are exhilarating. Others are confusing and downright terrifying. How can we make the best of them?

One solution is design. It is an agent of change that helps us to understand the changes in the world around us, and to turn them into things that can make our lives more efficient and enjoyable. If you rewind through design history, the most thrilling periods have been the ones of greatest change – like the 1920s “machine age” and 1960s “space age” – when designers interpreted shifts in science, technology, culture and the economy to help the rest of us.

The current wave of change could herald another golden era for design, but a new type of design, one which is more fluid, collaborative and inclusive. This presents designers and architects with formidable challenges and exciting opportunities. They can help to change the way we see the world and how we navigate it, not only by fulfilling their traditional role of creating objects, structures and images, but by applying the creative principles of design thinking to restructuring organizations, reinventing patterns of behaviour and tackling the urgent social and political problems of our time.

Alice Rawsthorn

In this Open Talk, design critic Alice Rawsthorn will ask the software designer Ben Fry, architect Lindy Roy and curator Joseph Grima to identify one unfairly neglected theme from design history and two themes that, they believe, will define the future of design and architecture.

13.09.09  11:00-13:00

In contrast to the frenzied search for the next hot trend, EXD calls upon design, architecture and lifestyle publications to foster profound, paradigm-defying critical reflection. By placing insightful criticism at the top of the editorial agenda, “blink and you’ll miss it” reporting gives way to slower and more fruitful processes of research, conceptualization and formulation.