Pandemic Design: Art, Space, and Embodiment

The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally altered experiences of space and engendered new spatial design tactics. This article discusses DIY pandemic design tactics used by U.S. microbusinesses to reshape embodied experiences of interior retail spaces, in relation to contemporary artworks. Over the course of the pandemic, large corporations developed standardized, mass-produced designs for pandemic wayfinding and interior demarcation. In contrast, many microbusinesses used DIY pandemic design tactics having formal qualities and phenomenological implications that resemble precedents in contemporary art. Although pandemic safety protocols could be seen as a form of social control, this article depicts their visualization in graphics and barriers as acts for reshaping collective space and as endangered forms of local, non-homogenized design.