As well as providing residencies and a fellowship programme for artists, IASPIS, the Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual and Applied Arts, and the Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University, have specialised in hosting residency and fellowship programmes geared towards designers, architects and spatial practitioners for over twenty years. During this time, the longer history and impact of artist residencies has been broadly documented and disseminated through journal issues, books and academic conferences. However, the recent and more concentrated emergence of residency and fellowship programmes geared towards designers and spatial practitioners has received comparatively little critical attention.
As an opportunity to address this gap, the two organisations came together to research the role of design and architecture residency and fellowship programmes. The collaboration began with the hosting of two public forums to discuss and share insights around residencies and fellowships together with affiliated practitioners, curators, educators, and residency organisers. The first forum, hosted at IASPIS, Stockholm in 2022, and a follow-up at the Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston Upon Thames in 2023, were an opportunity to draw attention to design and architecture residency and fellowship programmes whilst foregrounding the questions of what they “do” and “don’t do”, and what short- and long-term impact they have for participants and organisers. The forums were organised to allow practitioners and organisers to share their experiences of participating, hosting and thinking about residencies in an open and convivial space. From these forums, three areas where further research might be a valuable contribution to design and architecture residency and fellowship programmes, organisations and participants, were identified.
The first area was connected to the realisation and framing that the participation and hosting of residency and fellowship programmes could be considered a form of design practice itself. The logic being that they generate and provide the material, spatial, economic and organisational conditions for different forms of artistic practice and research to take place and be situated. Researching/Examining residency and fellowship programmes through the lens of design could be a generative way to analyse what they are and what they do, in broader and more specific terms.
The second area speculates that design and architecture residencies and fellowships, through their organisation, spatial and temporal arrangements, also allow for new forms of design research to be situated and emerge. Importantly, forms of design research that sit adjacent and are not fully conditioned to the structures and codes of research conducted within academia and the commercial design industry.
The third area relates to design and architecture education and the possibility of, more explicitly, acknowledging residency and fellowship programmes as frameworks for further study, research and practice. Here, they might be a site for engagement with learning and pedagogy that recognise residency and fellowship programmes as specific frameworks for knowledge production within the field of design and architecture.
As an opportunity to continue to think with these three areas and to reach a wider audience, we have invited forum participants to further elaborate on their experiences, questions, case studies and provocations. In addition, we have invited a number of contributions from residency organisers and practitioners who were either unable to attend the forums, or who had been subsequently referenced and cited by others during the discussions. Together, we hope these contributions go some way to addressing certain blind spots identified in the initial forums, whilst opening space for further research and inquiry into the role and capacities of residencies and fellowships in design and architecture.
RE: Design Residencies was initiated by Magnus Ericson at IASPIS, the Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual and Applied Arts and David Falkner at Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University and developed with Onkar Kular, HDK Valand, Academy of Art and Design, University of Gothenburg.
Texts have been commissioned and edited by Roberta Burchardt and Onkar Kular. Graphic Design by Johnny Chang.