Artists Selena Savić and Nikola Korać are continuing their excellent work on Unpleasant Design witha €20 workshop in Berlin on November 12 (tomorrow!). "Unpleasant Design" is Savić and Korać's name for design elements that are intended to be unpleasant for human beings in order to control their behaviour (for example, park benches with rigid handles that make it impossible to lie down).
The Earlier Unpleasant Design work included a competition to subvert "unpleasant design" whose winners included a systematic cramming of human beings into a space that was invisible to a heavily CCTV'ed area, and a portable bench that clipped onto a traffic pole, to ease the legs of people who sell tissues at stop-lights. There's an Unpleasant Design Book, too (its jacket is made of sandpaper, and it destroys any books you shelve it with) (here's a review).
This work continues on the excellent stuff Dan Lockton did with his long-running architectures of control in design, which I've written about a lot here (don't miss the deck of cards he made).
URBAN KNIGHTS, BERLIN 2013: UNPLEASANT DESIGN WORKSHOP
