About 1:1
This vessel collects and shares what’s happening in the educational space, to shape new thinking, and to open for parallel readings and multiple futures for design. Each year, 1:1 Journal releases an edited issue including a selection of entries that form a thematic publication. In 2025 the first issue, On Friendship, was released.
What does it then mean to practice in scale 1:1? To work with and understand our surroundings in full scale gives us access to the issues we take on with our bodies, enabling us to practice intuition and responsibility. In a world that is increasingly presented to us as a representation, through images mainly accessed through a screen, one could argue for the urgency of meeting with matter and bodies in a proximity and scale that the body can grasp. Matter matters.
Design practice is a border land, a threshold between the slumbering matter and the artefact, a struggle to make sense, a constant overlap of artistic and rational processes, intuition and strategy, poetry and economy. Acknowledging, and constantly questioning, the relational qualities of design opens for practices that could potentially suggest new attitudes or ways to organise not only work, labour, production, consumption, and the destruction of things, but also the way we, as a society, as humans, as living forms of matter, relate to each other.
At the MFA Design programme, we understand and approach design as inherently relational. It requires acknowledging the things at stake: what the things we make mean in its contexts; what the methods we use implies for the result; what the result really is; what we build through the process; and how we take care of what we learn. Students in the courses take on an explorative mode of practice. The concept of explorative practice here implies being brave, curious, expanding, unsure, processual, and open. In this process, it also means not always knowing where the explorative movement leads to. 1:1 Journal aims, likewise, to explore what the programme can be, hold, and communicate.
Eva Erwander
Jonas Fridén Kihl
Mattias Gunnarsson
and
Karin Linderoth
Contact
MFA Design programme:
mattias.gunnarsson@gu.se
1:1 Journal editors:
karin.linderoth@gu.se
AiC (Ola Lindgren and Victoria Skoglund)
Markus Bergström
Ainhoa Cortés
Maryam Fanni
Jonas Fridén Kihl
Erika Henriksson
Astrid Holstad Stephani
Karl-Magnus Johansson
Onkar Kular
Thomas Laurien
Karin Linderoth
José Luis Martínez Velarde
MASU (Mattias Gunnarsson and Susanne Westerberg)
1:1 is kindly supported by Göteborgs Slöjdförening and HDK-Valand Department of Design. Web design by Ola Lindgren / Skogen grafisk form