Tatev Yesayan
Tatev is a designer with a special interest in lighting and public spaces. Her work often explores modular structures that lend themselves to a wide range of applications: they create playful designs, or serve practical purposes such as easy disassembly, or the possibility of replacing or upgrading each part. Tatev is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Design at Concordia University. Her thesis work is a study into the agency of objects and the hidden power relations embedded in the built environment.
tatev.yesayan@gmail.com
Website
tatev-yesayan.com
Statement
My interest in doing design research around topics of politics and agency came from the realization that designers do not work in a vacuum, and that all the good intentions in the world are not enough when working within structures that already have vested interests in specific outcomes. This line of study confronted me with the complexity of power dynamics in the built environment, and the recognition that much of these structures of power cannot be traced back to specific stakeholders or institutions, but are deeply entrenched into our material culture. As a result, my work aims rather to find ways to expose these power relations that are so taken for granted that they have become invisible. As writes design scholar Christo Sims, “Design can act in insidiously political ways in cases where an artifact or environment’s prescriptive character is overlooked, forgotten, or treated as natural or normal.”
