Inside Out Festival sees the first of a series of salons co-curated by TCCE and Design Exchange magazine that are being developed to explore our relationship to design in a variety of contemporary contexts and to encourage discussion and debate on key issues relating to our current relationship to and perceptions about public space.

Even a cursory glance of today’s urban landscape reveals signs that suggest that the ways in which places were originally designed to perform their ‘place’ are evolving in response to new needs, desires, opportunities and technologies.

In what ways is this taking place? How is public space and indeed spaces where the public inhabit changing? Are the lines between public and private space shifting and if so in what ways? Who or what is pushing boundaries, creating new usages,  developing and subverting notions of space to meet the needs of people today? What can be achieved by creating alternative usages for public space? What are the implications, who is doing it and for what reasons?

What too is the potential for public space to become a more data-rich resource and what, beyond, the confines of surveillance which is now a given at the heart of most ‘public space’, might we expect to be engaging with in the near future. These are the kinds of questions that will form the basis of what is anticipated to be a rich discussion led by artists, researchers, designers, architects and others that will continue over the coming months.