🎨Design Studio 01
Research through Design
Pluriversal design (Escobar, 2018)
Transition design
Social design
Critical and speculative design
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Design oriented research serves as a tool for conducting research and generating knowledge
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First person methodologies: What, why how?
There’s a bigger chance of something solving a problem coming from a first person perspective. If it works for you it’ll probably work for someone else too in a similar position
1PP RtD
Experiential
Crafting
Understanding and augmenting
Socio-political
What do we know about 1PP
It’s a way of acting
It’s a way of looking at things
It’s a way of being involved
Challenges
Working with materials at hand
Putting yourself at risk
Commiting to 1PP in practice
Task 1: Design space
A navigational tool in the (design) practice to ground reflection
A visual database to collect references, projects, materials, prototypes, etc.
Space for defining collections of ideas and concepts
See which pile has more entries so you can identify your interests
A mirror, to define reflection as bringing unconscious experience to awareness, question values and perspectives we unconsciously embody as designers
It’s dynamic, and iterative to allow for calibration or practice
Key roles
Situating
Understanding surroundings to allow links to arise
Organizational
Narrative
Understand narrative better through the diversity. See what conversations arise
Performative
Combining design spaces - collaborative design spaces. Give feedback to oneself
Inspirational
Observe what might 💥spark💥
Check out MY Design Space + The Atlas of Weak Signals Exercise
Alternative presents
Understanding our overarching narratives, Making sense of the alternative presents you are creating with
Open escape routes to the present continuities, offering space to radically imagine and probe discontinuities.
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A continuity is my daily routine of society. A discontinuity occurs when an intervention happens to the continuity.
Present continuities ➡️ (oportunity) ➡️ Alternative present
Present continuities
The citizens of Barcelona like ourselves, are part of a society that is based on Planned obsolescence revolving on non renewable materials as a main source for ideation and fabrication in almost all areas of society; therefore their actions reflect and feed the system further worsening the situation.
This approach is not sustainable long term, or takes into account the future society that may differ from today’s needs, practices and cultures.
Alternative present
The citizens of Barcelona like ourselves, are educated on the use of the materials, processes, and “implications” of the natural world such as bees, moss, and mycelium. This mentality is applied on all possible areas of society such as architecture, mass production, and waste management while taking into account the human sensory experience as a priority . A new era of Nature(al) intervention was born, the end of the conventional anthropocene
Transforming scales
Country (Educational policies and laws that enable the individual to exercise their rights to learn beyond basic learning)
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City (Create and foster collaboration centres among different stakeholders to enable education and application)
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Neighborhood (Allow for citizens to collaborate and start conversing on a common level)
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Family (Create an environment that helps curate and pass down knowledge to the young ones)
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Citizen 😀 (Practical application to become a part of a society)
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Kid (Education, values, practices)
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Baby (Stimuli and context it grows up in)
Multi-scalar mapping
Contribute to the design space in 1PP research
Practitioners might feel disempowered to tackle current crisis and emerging futures
Available resources, agency, capacity and the scope of the action
Show interconnection among different scales (bodies to planets)
How our interest are present at different scales?
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How do you see your purpose in the different scales you are traversing?
Extended workspaces:
We all live in a different context, it's important to understand what's within our reach and abilities in order to stay within this same context if we want to adhere to the 1st person perspective design methodology.
Design interventions (Design actions)
Every 2 weeks
A design action developed with others in context, an opportunity to co-create and iterate prototypes with others. We want to transform ourselves and others through design and reflection (maybe there will be shifts in perspective). An experience to learn through situated action
🕶️ The purpose is to test things out and see if i actually enjoy it
Roles of prototyping in 1PP
For an activity we had in class, during which we learned about the different types fo prototyping, we had to pair up and create a prototype that might work for my partner's project. I paired up with Hanna. Her project wanted to explore the human mind, and ultimatelly find a way to reprogram it using one's own thoughts and values. Here's my idea of a prototype that might help her gather different information:
The idea was that the prototype would be a phone booth with electrodes conecting to your temples. Once that is connected, the user would be prompted to say any affirmations or mantras that they use daily. The machine would recollect these textual phrases as well as the brain waves associated with the user saying them out loud. This would ultimately provide Hanna with valuable insight on what users are using to hype themselves up, as well as training data for whatever algorithm she might develop in the future.
Collaborative Design space + 1st. Collective Intervention
For our second intervention for the course, we were asked to do a Collaborative Design Space with the whole class. From there we started to make connections among all of the topics that interested us, leading us to find our group to do Design Intervention No. 2 – a collaborative approach. For me, it meant working with some amazing people: Carlos Silveira, Maithili Sathe and Paula Rydel; for we had a common ground on our design spaces.
This common ground was simple at first sight but more complex if you zoomed in. In the end, we concluded that where all of our (different) design spaces merged was in the topic of Symbiotic nature cultures.
Once we had settled on what the common ground was for all of us to take something from this intervention that would serve for our individual uses and interest, we proceeded to write down some ideas of what we could do as an intervention; more importantly... what we wanted to take from this experience. After some initial sketches and discussions, we settled on an amazing idea: a collective "cookbook" of ancient nature cultures.
Here's the result of the intervention:
As a result of the intervention, we got to know a lot of different perspectives of what a "future nature culture" could look like, and what that meant to each and everyone of the participants. We drew ideas and conclusions from the tiles that they created, which further enriched the experience for the next person interacting with us. Overall we got a variety of different focuses and cores for what each person's nature culture meant. It was very interesting seeing what people considered to be a priority in what a culture holds closely.
The common ground among the participants lies in their shared aspiration for a culture that balances sustainability, spirituality, and community. They collectively advocate for practices that respect nature, enhance health, and foster meaningful relationships, while challenging extractive and impersonal systems. Their vision underscores an integrated approach to living that harmonizes ecological, ethical, and humanistic values.
New design Space
After most part of the first term, and extensive exploration of adjacent topics not necesarrily centered towards what I'd wanted to explore initially, I decided I wanted to update my design space for it to be more focused and centralized. I took the time during the term to analyze the topics that I was interested in and actually put them into words or clusters that could be added to a design space.
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