Design Action in partnership with the Park Avenue Armory as part of "Making Space at the Park Avenue Armory" commissioned eight artists and their collaborators to create six design events or interventions in 48 hours responding to the prompt "Take Space: Disrupting With Love.” These eight designers were chosen from a thrilling pool of emerging designers of color who applied to participate in this four day process (two days of creation and two days of showing).

These short pieces and installations celebrated collaboration, liveness, creative experimentation and the time-pressured world of theater-making, while speaking from points of view of the Global Majority. We trusted these emerging designers with permission to be daring — to make mistakes, and to enjoy experimenting with their responses to this prompt.

Since designers are artists of space, we also wished for these artists to consider and respond to the physical space that is the Park Avenue Armory and the colonial legacies embedded within its walls.

This “live-event” portion of the symposium’s program was meant to celebrate the creation of art simply for the sake of making art. An opportunity that sometimes feels rare for theatre designers, who must always consider the many physical, conceptual, and economic constraints of the stage when developing work.

We hope that the process was creative and inspiring for the artists, and that the audience engaged with the pieces in a similar spirit of discovery. These low budget, condensed-time-frame pieces are presented as the work of a collective — in conversation, not competition, with one another.