TRANSFORMING THE TRANSFORMER IN A TIME OF CRISIS - Matteo Maria Moretti
P.108 To let readers relate to the visual translation, the project creates
a climate-specific narrative surrounding the readers’ respective
locations. By leveraging highly detailed data, the audience is exposed to
the climate of the places they care about rather than being presented with
aggregate data on a regional or national level. This approach fosters a
connection between the audience and a complex and global phenomenon,
relying on readers’ places as a proxy. Notably, it serves to diminish the
perceived distance between everyday life and the phenomenon of climate
change, which is often viewed as distant.
P.111 Today’s society faces a serious crisis of understanding, further
aggravated by the acceleration of technology and the crisis of information
design that fails to deliver transparent and enabling information.
DISRUPTING BY DESIGN: ASSESSING IMAGINARIES OF TECHNO-FUTURES - Stefanie
Oldenburg, Marius Land
P.123 Consequently, it takes transdisciplinary and experimental
environments for innovations to thrive. Yet, based on the faith “that we
can control and take charge of the world in which we live, and that we
have sufficient knowledge and technology to do this in a way that will
improve our situation”, the current predominant technological research is
based more on pre-defined “solutions”. The term critiques a narrow-minded
focus on technological fixes that understands “all complex social
situations either as neatly defined problems with definite, computable
solutions or as transparent and self-evident processes that can be easily
optimised”. Thus, the normative agenda-driven pursuit for sustainable
technological solutions raises the question of whether “technology can be
used to fix the very problems caused by technology”.
DESIGNING TOGETHER IN MULTI-CRISIS TIMES - Nathaly Pinto, Efrén Nango
P.198 In particular, encounters with realities beyond those of the Global
North and its prevailing neoliberal capitalist economy have promoted
active pursuit of more meaningful engagement with diverse communities,
facing complex challenges. … As historically excluded communities and
territories continue to feel the impact of dominant structures of power
and dispossession, bound up with multiple crises, we find it crucial to
continue challenging the ways in which the various approaches and
positionalities can either assist or counteract asymmetric/extractive
research relationships.
P.213 Mundane and strategic tasks can aid opening spaces for collective
action that encourage all participants to experiment with different forms
of knowledge and sill-building, with a grounding in everyday concerns, to
challenge the prevailing reality from its members’ unique vantage points.
… In this framework, effects of mundane and strategic work with indigenous
communities that are challenging to sustain, visualise, and incorporate
into the prevailing academic narratives can contribute to a collective
history of resistance against dominant structures, both within and beyond
design projects.
DESIGN PEDAGOGY IN AN UNCERTAIN WORLD - Cecilia de Marinis, Jaron Rowan
P.236 In a contemporary landscape defined by the intricacies and
uncertainties of a rapidly evolving world, the role of design takes on a
fundamental significance in questioning the present and envisioning
alternative futures, contributing to transformations and processes and
offering new perspectives to look at reality. … That is, understanding
complexity but also being able to imagine and open alternatives. …
Taking inspiration from Manning and Massumi, we conceive design as a
mode of thinking in action, an interconnected process where knowledge is
generated through the process of making, dismantling the thinking/making
dichotomy. This form of cognition inhabits the space between thought and
action, theory and practice, a threshold where boundaries blend and
transitions are not linear.
P.239 Contemporary design and the multiple practices it includes operates
in a complex intersection. It needs to be able to navigate and articulate
makes interests and social needs. Academic requirements and political
agendas. Aesthetic challenges and ethical concerns. In this sense, design
crosses many disciplines and fields. … technical skills with poetic views.
It needs to encourage radical forms of imagination with attention to
detail and the importance the context.
P.239 The neoliberal emphasis on the autonomy of the subject, the
prominence of the idea of the person as being independent of the
environment, and the gradual erosion of forms of political organisation to
favour narratives centred on the self and the individual identity of the
subjects, have contributed to particularise many of our share problems. …
We need to articulate these problems with broader contexts, where we can
see and understand the interconnections and structural causes that
underlie them.
Materialising the problems by taking into account the structurally
of power relations, the institutional frameworks that reproduces them, and
the infrastructure designs and production models on which they are based,
are some necessary steps to overcome the limitation of focusing only on
particular and individual effects and address the full range and
complexity of the problems that unfold in front of us.
P.241 In his recent book, “designing for interdependence”, Marti Avila
explores ways in which we can design for more-than-human worlds. …
Interdependence, as a condition of everything that is alive, makes it
evident how the concept of care and the practices it entails are
fundamental elements. They are not only essential to sustain and maintain
relationships, and thus the continuity of the system, but essential also
as a way to approach reality. Care becomes a tool to observe, make senses
of , and navigate reality, and consequently, to question the status quo
and imagine alternative worlds.