Lunch 12: Tactics

Tactics, hacks, DIY, maker culture – these terms have begun to permeate our design vocabulary. The tactical mindset eschews convention in favor of subversion. The tactician is not afraid of failure, but rather embraces projects as design(ed) experiments. Tactics are pragmatic and instrumental, fluid and adaptive. Tactics are heterogeneous, occurring between the binaries of permanent and temporal, constructed and imagined, sanctioned and unsanctioned. The recent rise of tactics is illustrated by events and developments across the United States, including the occupy movement, guerilla urbanism, and tactical urbanism – movements in which citizens affect change in their cities through small-scale and often temporary actions. Building on these threads, Lunch 12 asks how the tactical can permanently transform the design process and seeks to reconcile the widening gap between the crafted and the constructed, the visible and the invisible, the designer and the public.