Since Romania joined the European Union, its manufacturing sector has experienced substantial growth. Simultaneously, the global manufacturing landscape is undergoing a profound transformation due to rapid digitalisation and the integration of global supply chains, making innovation a paramount necessity for the country. This expertise is evident throughout Timisoara, in its industrial parks, specialised labour market, and technical universities. Interconnected networks of knowledge, resources, and values not only facilitate multinational corporations, city developments, and academic laboratories but also continue to honour the city’s engineering legacy. However, the potential of design often remains untapped and concealed within academic research networks, corporate intellectual property, mechanical components, sophisticated technological objects, and profit-driven logics.
`Turn Signals—Design Is Not A Dashboard` is an exhibition that explores how design can act as a conduit for collaborative ventures that go beyond the confines of established manufacturing parameters. Anchored within the contextual framework provided by a commissioned report, ‘Economy in Timisoara: Territorial Distribution of the Economy in the TimisoaraMetropolitan Area’, the exhibition invited multidisciplinary practitioners to collaborate with local researchers, interpreting the statistical data through the designed lenses of devices, bodies, agents, media, forces, and networks.These collaborations drew from existing research, leveraged the local engineering network, and engaged with well-established knowledge systems within and beyond Timisoara’s industrial ecosystem. The resulting projects converge at the crossroads of information asymmetries across disciplines, supply chain stages, computational processes, the collective imagination, material cultures, and the expansive manufactured environment. By observing and reinterpreting the navigational pathways of these asymmetries, these projects signal the presence, concealment, and imminent transformation of design within Timisoara.