January 20, 2009, Day 1 of the Obama presidency, began the current administration’s commitment to transparency, participation and collaboration in government. On Day 29, February 17, President Obama signed the Recovery Act into law and launched Recovery.gov, a website publishing the spending of recovery funds in the name of transparency, offering “maps, charts, and graphics” to illustrate the distribution of funds.
IMAGINING RECOVERY called upon designers of all types to imagine the futures these objective maps, charts, graphics and accounting figures served to anticipate, and to interpret for the public the lived experience of this future by producing an image of recovery.
Designers from 36 countries signed up to collaborate with public policy students from around the world to discuss the intersection of design and recovery, producing a series of questions, and a destabilization of the existing evaluative criterion for design, to address in the competition.
Projects were submitted on Day 100, April 29, and on Day 114, May 13, a distinguished jury of design and image experts met at the Art Directors Club in New York to select a series of projects for recognition and prizes from Apple. Following the deliberation, the jury discussed the process at Studio X in a public forum. Footage of both events are available here.
The archive of the competition lives on in its after-image, the IMAGINING RECOVERY Mobile Laboratory and a series of forthcoming publications.
The competition is now closed.