TIME IS PRESENT. Designing the Common
Curated by Angela Rui
TIME IS PRESENT. Designing the Common is the title chosen for the 4th Porto Design Biennale edition and it invites for a shift in our daily perspective: instead of critically tackling the anxiety of modern temporality, it suggests to observe the potential of qualitative time.The present is not seen as a crisis to overcome, rather as a gift filled with collective possibilities waiting to be activated. This perspective fully inhabits the now rather than projecting into speculative futures.
Therefore, in the upcoming edition of the Porto Design Biennale, the design discipline is not intended as a future-oriented or problem-solving practice, but rather as an active, ongoing, down-to-earth engagement with the materiality of the present, where the collective capacity to shape systemic relations becomes both medium and subject.
The seeds of all this are already all around us, and particularly in recent years — as a social and economic effect of the pandemic condition there has been an expansion of associationism that can be read as a bottom-up attempt to find valid and shared alternatives to growing inequalities by groups of people with shared goals, based on mutual solidarity and autonomy.
Angela Rui
Angela Rui is a design curator and researcher based in Milan. She obtained her PhD in Exhibition Design from the Politecnico di Milano, Faculty of Architecture. The former designer was an editor for years, now contributing — through mentoring, curating and writing — to the revision of the role of design as a critical practice that supports and protects eco-social renewal through experimental methodologies of systemic, relational and regenerative design.
Participating in a wide variety of projects, she has also curated exhibitions: ITALY: A New Collective Landscape (ADI Design Museum, Milan 2023); HKDG, Hong Kong 2024, Italian Pavilion Expo2010, (Shanghai 2024) and AQUARIA. Ou a Ilusão de um Mar Encaixado at MAAT (Lisbon, 2021).
Angela Rui is currently Director of the Master of Arts programme at IED Milano. Her texts have been published in magazines such as Abitare, Domus, Icon Design, Pinup, Riposte, Vogue, TLmag, Terraforma Journal, Flashart Italia, Lotus.