Future Talks (Guests)
Reflection Seminar
Future Talks is a series of conversations with friends of ELISAVA and Fab Lab Barcelona, exploring the nature of emerging futures from the past to the present and beyond.
Syllabus⇝
Research has shown that most of the job opportunities and future challenges that will arise in the next few years still don’t exist. Instead of seeing it as a threat, we want you to look at it as an opportunity. An opportunity to actively create your own path, your own vision and identity rather than passively wait for what is needed.
In MDEF we believe that learning should be driven by your motivations and not by our (the teachers) thoughts. We want you to be in control of your own development especially in a master program full of activities. We want you to plan a strategic turn for yourself. We will provide you with a variety of knowledge, skills and attitudes to compare yourself with.
In this series of talks, critical reflection will help you to map your strengths and weaknesses in relation to the approach to design that the master is proposing. A series of presentations and visits to key professionals will make you aware about how your thinking, making, interests and values differ from others.
Schedule⇝
Jessica Guy and Olga Trevisan - Designing with values
Hangar’s WetLab - Networks of Co-Responsibility
Bani Brusadin - Radical Situatedness (Flows, Knowledge and Infrastructures)
Mario Santamaría - Internet Tour
Deliverables⇝
At the end of this trimester we ask you to update who you are and what makes you unique (identity) and your personal “vision” of your future as a professional. The Thesis Draft will include space to reflect on your Vision and Identity and how that evolved this term. For this section we ask you all to reflect on how applicable and useful the knowledge presented by each of the guests is in your practice/project. Please do a self-reflective paragraph long post on each of the talks.
These are the points we are going to look for the evaluation of Future talks:
- Attendance
- Understanding of your design interventions in the context of the future talk.
- Reflection and application (if relevant) of future talk on practice.
- What opportunities might arise by taking these future talks into consideration.
Grading Method⇝
Grading criteria will be defined by faculty during the module.
European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS)
2 ECTS
Faculty⇝
Guillem Camprodon is a designer and technologist working in the intersection between emergent technologies and grassroots communities. He is the executive director of Fab Lab Barcelona at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC), a benchmark in the network of over 2000 Fab Labs and home of the Distributed Design Platform. He has a passion for teaching and is the co-director of the Master on Design For Emergent Futures (MDEF), a collaboration between IAAC and ELISAVA. Previously, he led Smart Citizen, a platform that opposes the traditional top-down Smart City model, empowering communities with tools to understand their environment. As a former research lead, he participated in many European-funded research and innovation projects, such as Making Sense, iSCAPE, GROW Observatory, Organicity, DECODE, ROMI and Reflow.
Laura Benitez has a Ph.D. in Philosophy and is a researcher, and university lecturer. Her research connects philosophy, art(s), and technoscience. She is an associate professor at the Department of Philosophy at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She also teaches at Elisava. She has served as the coordinator of the Theory area in the Arts and Design Degree at Massana, where she has taught Critical and Cultural Studies. She has been a visiting researcher at the Ars Electronica Center and the Center for Studies and Documentation of MACBA. She has also collaborated with international institutions such as Interface Cultures Kunstuniversität Linz, Sónar Festival (Barcelona/Hong Kong), Royal Academy of Arts London, and the University of Puerto Rico. Between 2019 and 2021, she directed Biofriction, a European project (Creative Europe) on bioart and biohacking practices, led by Hangar in collaboration with the Bioart Society, Kersnikova, and Cultivamos Cultura. She is co-director of the Master on Design For Emergent Futures (MDEF).
As a designer and researcher with a strong focus on sustainable practices and innovative design methodologies, Jana is committed to questioning and challenging the field of design. By continuously striving for movement and positive change, she puts sustainability, innovation, and care at the forefront of her work — which is always underpinned by post-humanist and feminist materialist thought. In her design practice, Jana’s work is community-driven and collaborative, working with other designers and artists to create thought-provoking installations and experiences.
Roger Guilemany is a founding member of the design cooperative aqui, where he contributes, through action research, to processes of ecosocial transition and the praxis of participatory design. As an independent researcher, he is interested in relationships and collaborative processes of situated production. With his design practice, he also collaborates with commoning projects and other self-governance structures.
Bani Brusadin is a curator, educator and researcher interested in the possible feedback loops between art, digital cultures, planetary-scale technologies and their politics. He currently collaborates with Medialab Matadero (Madrid) and Fundación Foto Colectania (Barcelona). He was one of the guest curators for the 2023 edition of the renowned Berlin-based festival of art and digital cultures transmediale. In the past he founded and co-curated The Influencers, a festival about experimental art, design and activist practices in the networked society, co-produced by the CCCB Barcelona (2004 - 2019). He holds a PhD in Advanced Artistic Practices (University of Barcelona) and teaches in BA and master degree programs at Elisava, the University of Barcelona, and Esdi. He is the author of the essay The Fog of Systems, published by Aksioma Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana (2021).
Artist and researcher, born in Argentina and resident in Europe since 2000, living between Barcelona and Bourges. She studied Social Anthropology in Buenos Aires, while doing internships in performing arts and in 2008, together with Kina Madno, she created the lab, Quimera Rosa. From this point on she focused her corporal and investigative work on post-identity gender policies and corporal, identity and technoscience experimentations from a trans*feminist perspective.
Her work currently focuses on the development of performances, transdisciplinary projects and interactive installations, elaborating devices that function through corporal activity and experimentations in biohacking. In 2016, she began working with Quimera Rosa on the project Trans*Plant, carried out and produced by Ars Electrónica and the European Media Artists in Residence Exchange (EMARE), Hangar and the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park (PRBB), the University of California in Davis and L'Antre Peaux. She is a resident artist together with Gaia Leandra at the Hangar wetlab (2020/2022), where she carries out projects of investigation and experimentation in art and science from a transhackfeminist vision.
The artistic practice of Mario Santamaría (Burgos, Spain, 1985) studies the phenomenon of the contemporary observer, paying attention to two processes, the representational practices and the machines vision or mediation. Using different tactics such as appropiation, remake or assembly, his work involves different fields like the conflict, the memory, the virtuality or the surveillance. He has been a resident artist at Hangar (Barcelona, 2015), Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg (Stuttgart, Germany, 2015) and Flax Art Studios (Belfast, Northern Ireland, 2014), among others. At CCCB he is a regular contributor to the The Influencers festival where he has developed projects such as Internet Yami-Ichi (2016, 2017) or Barcelona Internet Tour (2018).