Lunch 13: : Mischief

Lunch is an annual, student-edited design research journal at the University of Virginia School of Architecture that aims to facilitate conversations across disciplines and communities, publishing articles, research, interviews, and projects that critically engage with contemporary design topics.

Throughout history mischief-makers have plagued the over-powerful, puncturing the smug assumptions of Fat Cats, Big Cheeses, and High Muck-a-Mucks. From Coyote to Anansi to Shakespeare''s fools, the trickster holds the trump card when the chips are down, the stakes are high, and the owner of the casino is the President of the United States. We posit the wicked pleasures of the trickster tale as an enticing alternative to dreary disaster-capitalist narratives, technocratic solutionism, and universalist fictions of Authority, Progress, Unity, and Truth. This issue of Lunch (13: Mischief) is a collection of articles, letters, manifestos, anti-manifestos, graphics, games and narratives that approach design more impishly than urgently, that uproot assumptions that solutions are the solution, that wiggle under the garden fence and leave the farmer with a fistful of fur - but no bunny.