What happens when you look at design as some thing more than a service-based relationship between client and designer? What new strategies and models help to question and challenge the limits of design? What outer circumstances influence this kind of practice?

Arrow Factory is an independently run art space located in a narrow 200-year old alleyway in the center of Beijing. This publication provides a valuable look into the uniqueness of our contemporary situation, and captures for posterity the fleeting connections that situate Arrow Factory in China’s larger economic, intellectual, and artistic zeitgeist.

Casco Issues is a magazine published by Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory, which explores recurring issues that emerge from Casco’s program. The twelfth edition of Casco Issues, Generous Structures, is a playful enquiry into “playfulness” as a value in critical cultural practice. It positions alternative notions of playing against the grain of neoliberal ideologies of “lifelong learning” and “work as play.”

In the slipstream of conceptual art, the intimate interweaving of meaning and materialization in art and design came to be discredited in the second half of the twentieth century. The master’s program Material Utopias at the Sandberg Instituut put an end to this tradition by abolishing the unproductive hierarchy separating “concept” and “making,” “content” and “process.”