What's "Where is your other half"?
This project was a personal act of relation-making—our wedding—performed by us, two design researchers, a Chinese and an Indian citizen, at the Indo-China border during a military standoff between the two nations.
Alongside the wedding itself we designed three artefacts that explore the nuances of this contested political border. One is the video you see to the left, another is the wedding rings (see below, left), which are shaped in the profile of Indo-China border along Nathula Pass, and finally we explored speculative proposals for wedding venues (black and white illustration, below right).
Who's it for?
Our main audience with this work is other Design Researchers. By framing our wedding as an example of Design Research we intend to highlight that something as personal and intimate as a wedding can be used to apply design's way of looking at the world to political science, cultural geography and Asian studies.
Approach
Donning multiple roles, of design researchers, Chinese and Indian citizens, and a to-be-wed couple, we actively played with professional, political and cultural identities. Using such identities as a design resource, we interpreted and transformed state administered border control protocols and subverted them for a personal relation-making ritual.
Secondly, being a performance-based project, the context/site specificity of the contested political border between India and China played a strong role. This aspect made us divest control and treat the Indo-China border as having its own agency. This background shaped the wedding as a performative site-specific Research through Design (RtD) project.
Contribution
The project highlights the use of performative Research through Design (RtD) for personal relationship making while inquiring into political identities and boundaries. It allowed the merging of the personal and the political to explore, articulate and critique wider structures like borders that keep apart people and cultures.
Performing relation-making events like a wedding can be a genre for Design Research.
Why is it in the Observatory?
Ours is the only Design Research project in history that was also a wedding (that we know of!)
Casting our wedding in this light shows how Design Research can be articulated as a performative practice that engages in critique and challenges political and cultural boundaries. It shows how Design Research can become a lens for activism and emancipation, as well as an instrumental means to produce new knowledge. Our wedding shows how Design Researchers can actively integrate their personal, professional and political identities directly into their projects. At a time of global crises, the ability for researchers to blur the the boundaries between science and sensibility is an increasingly valuable thing.