Wild design and its activism in everyday urban life

Abstract

This research posits non-professional design as the arena where wild design and its activism in everyday urban life is identified, and investigates the do-it-yourself creativities undertaken by socio-economically and culturally marginalised urbanites in China. Two questions pertain to the research: how does wild design praxis work with time and space? how do wild design agencies challenge/negotiate with the larger-scale infrastructural system? This research sets out to refer to visual archives established by artists Michael Wolf, Bill Aitchison, Huang Heshan, and Chu Jini; conducts fieldworks and interviews; and analyses empirical evidence through taxonomies and case study approaches. Drawing upon the theories of Michel De Certeau’s ‘la perruque’, and Henri Lefebvre’s tripartite production of social space, the article argues that by growing wildly beyond the binaries between the planned and the unplanned, the stable and the variable, the formal and the informal, wild design offers a lived reference to non-professional design agencies.