Design Is The World

Despite its dazzling, hyperbolic rhetoric, the third Istanbul Design Biennial largely delivers on its assertions.

- Shumi Bose

Contemporary life seems to allow, even require, a stretch beyond human capacity. Think of the limits we seek to surpass, through daily fitness goals and body-honing machines, age-defying toxins and artificial insemination, interplanetary travel and supersonic speed.

And yet, as shown by the kaleidoscopic responses to Are We Human?, the title of this year’s Istanbul Design Biennial, there is no such thing as an authentic human condition, unless it is understood to be synonymous with the act of design itself. So say the event’s curators, the architectural academics Mark Wigley and Beatriz Colomina, who maintain that the human is a “totally designed” being. It’s a position that demolishes any notion of professional siloism; indeed, every facet of life demonstrates the human intellect shaping and forming conditions to suit itself.

This explains the biennial’s carnivalesque range of participants—not only bona fide designers but also artists,architects, scientists, filmmakers, historians, theorists, choreographers, and even archaeologists—and works, from installations to panels to near-ubiquitous video. All together, they ask whether it is even possible to consider being human without also considering the way we “design” our lives, and how these products of design have in turn “designed” us. In a way, this could be seen as an ultimate catchall—a cop-out as a polemic theme—but the constellation of works possess rather profound implications for, within, and outside the design field.