OK-RM practice design in ways which have not long been possible. Founded in London in 2008 by Knight and McGrath, the studio approaches cultural production with a resolutely contemporary outlook: attuned to a networked communication space, undeterred by the realities of global commerce, and with a degree of technical autonomy which their predecessors would hardly have countenanced. Even half a century ago the designer’s imaginary was dominated and disciplined by established craft and industrial practices, its attention consumed by achieving accuracy in production. However, the studio is far from self-contained. Its exchanges with other practices — spatial, time-based, performative — take on a novel emphasis. Collaborators are engaged not merely to outsource and output according to conventional divisions of labour, but rather curatorially, to expand the conceptual vocabulary around a project. Each project’s roster contributes to its affect, and design, as OK-RM practice it, becomes primarily a discursive matter. Literacies, cultural codes, and dissemination are the preoccupations of the daily conversation in the studio.

Formal aspects of design: its practical functionality, its alluring high-finish, are secondary, taken for granted. Even as the past two decades have enabled new forms of design practice, so have they seen design’s publics fracture and complicate. The whole notion of a singular, shared consciousness, upheld by the centralised hierarchies of traditional media, has been undermined by the immediacy and pervasiveness of the internet. Again, OK-RM’s timing is critical. They were educated in the codes of print culture, and yet they have always understood that a designed object’s image is essential, every bit as significant as its materiality. This fluency in print and digital media has inevitably brought OK-RM into contact with fashion. There, where twenty-first century culture, technology, and commerce meet at maximum intensity, the studio embraces the fluidity of the contemporary while rejecting its trashy, over-ironised aesthetics. This exhibition borrows its title from Victor Papanek’s 1985 description of design as “a conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaningful order.” Papanek’s language remains relevant for OK-RM.

Conscious: as in outward-looking, alert. Intuitive: unbound by entrenched methods. The word impose might be jarring, however, implying a tactless or deterministic attitude. In the printing industry it historically described an economical way of arranging pages for production, in anticipation of their subsequent transformation by folding, cutting, and binding, and it is this anticipatory perspective which resonates for OK-RM. Everything is seen as it will be. Every potential message, every wording, every image, every technical detail, is evaluated in light of the inflections which will follow from its mediation and remediation. This way of seeing is the studio’s craft.