Turn Signals — Design is not a Dashboard
September 2023
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 projectsconverge at the crossroads of information asymmetries across disciplines,supply chain stages, computational processes, the collective imagination,material cultures, and the expansive manufactured environment. By observingand reinterpreting the navigational pathways of these asymmetries, theseprojects signal the presence, concealment, and imminent transformation ofdesign within Timisoara.
The exhibition’s title draws inspiration from an indispensable everyday object produced in local and multinational automotive plants in Timisoara—the turn signal indicators on vehicles, used to communicate directional shifts to fellow drivers. These indicators, enmeshed within the intricacies of engineering processes and nestled onto dashboards, exemplify the potential for design to be limited to mechanical refinement and obscured by technological complexities. By exceeding the confines of a mere dashboard, the design practices and discourses in the exhibition have explored the city’s products and resources from local and global perspectives, connecting places, people, and urgencies across different scales. The exhibition serves as a turn signal to Timisoara, inviting a new trajectory for the city’s design, architecture, and digital culture.
