This is the annual issue of 1:1. It is an edited excerpt from 1:1 Journal publishing documentation, traces and texts from pedagogical situations, students’ work, friends and staff practices in order to provide insight into the two-year transdisciplinary MFA Design programme at HDK-Valand, Göteborg University.

1:1 Journal aims to archive and communicate the thematic currents and thoughts flowing through the program and its community. It is a vessel for collecting and sharing what’s happening in the educational space, to shape new thinking, and to open for parallel readings and multiple futures for design.

This issue of 1:1 revolves around the concept of friendship. Friendship can, in the setting of design education, function as an attitude or a lens through which we can examine concepts such as mutuality, listening, solidarity, and responsibility—beyond general statements of “sustainability.” But it is also a very concrete suggestion for a way to organise work and our relationship to our field of practice, as Maryam Fanni points out in her essay Friendship is radical.

Friendship as an attitude and friendshipping as a verb challenges the dominant competitive neoliberal framework of private as well as professional relations and suggests other ways of building alliances and forces for change. As alumnus José Luis Velarde reflects in his thesis work and essay Bonding through darkness: “Through working together, I was again able to understand that my problems were not unique. Understanding, yet again, that they were echoed through many people, and recognizing this, we became a community.” It can be understood as a transition that is mainly unmeasurable, but equally an experience we as humans can draw and learn from. It can suggest new modalities, also in design practice, beyond those of the consumer and the entrepreneur. It potentially exists within the same sphere as the concept of the gift, enabling the capacity to give and to be able to receive as an act of trust. Actively practicing friendshipping can be a training ground, however maybe never fully translatable to relations on all scales or spheres of society. 

Borrowing from this, the MFA programme aims to allow design practice to span over time, at a pace that opens up the ability to think, giving the time and space to reflect on what has happened and the language to formulate other narratives. It offers design a temporality to “open up” to the yet un-thought and un-made, to world-make with other thinkings, species, matters, and friendships. For design to, like friendship, be a process that dares to be held accountable, that dares to promise.