Design With Others
Reflection Workshop
Syllabus⇝
A four-day seminar of four-hour sessions to kickstart designing with creative communities and engaging with the social body.
Design practice and the role of the designer have been continuously evolving. What began as a practical discipline at the service of industry ("design over") expanded to include the perspective of the human user and their needs ("design for") and later evolved into more participatory approaches where the user becomes an active agent in the design process ("design with"). In the context of growing existential risks and challenges, it is now critical to push these questions further by incorporating principles of otherness, design justice, alterity, communities, situated epistemologies and intra-action into design practices.
Learning Objectives⇝
Students after completion of the course should be able to:
- Detect, understand and tackle complex issues through design practices.
- Engage with “creative communities” related to the matters of concern.
- Situate their practice in the field.
- Engage in strategic intervention.
- Get familiar and confident facilitating groups of people and processes.
- Widen their community engagement perspective and learn to work(in) non-human agents.
Keywords: Other(ness), Communities, Collaboration
Schedule⇝
9:30-13:30
Class with Marta Delatte on Design Justice
Rethinking traditional design processes and frameworks to prioritize social equity, inclusion, and justice. It would explore how design—whether in technology, architecture, urban planning, or other fields—can perpetuate or disrupt existing systems of oppression. The session would emphasize the importance of centering “marginalized” communities in the design process, ensuring their needs, experiences, and knowledge guide the outcomes. The class would be encouraged to critically analyze our work not as neutral but as an influential force for either maintaining or challenging social-political inequities.
9:30-11:30
Session with Laura Benítez on Other(ness)
In the first part of the session, we will explore the concept of "the Other" and its central role in shaping contemporary philosophical, social, and ethical thinking. The session will also introduce how contemporary debates approach the notion, experience, and construction of the "Other." (Ethics of alterity/otherness).
11:30-13:30
Visit to Salamina - eemeemee
In the second part of the session, we will visit Salamina, a shared workspace in an industrial building in L'Hospitalet. We will visit one of the resident collectives, eemeemee [Enclave Micopirata Mutante], whose purpose is to maintain a community network to share processes and knowledge generated around DIWO mycology. Each of the participants in the network carries out on their own and collectively in the field of mycology and mushroom cultivation, both for food sovereignty purposes and for the development of tools for bioremediation of the territory or the discussion of ecological and interspecific relationships and hierarchies.
9:30-11:30
Session with Laura Benítez on Agency and situated epistemologies
This session explores critical concepts from contemporary philosophy, social theory, and feminist science studies to examine how human and non-human entities influence and relate to each other in dynamic systems. It is focused on shifting away from traditional views of agency as an individual trait toward more relational, interconnected models of action. Rethinking agency beyond individual autonomy emphasises a network of relationships and intra-actions that create possibilities and onto-ethical-epistemological challenges in contemporary life.
11:30-13:30
Visit to Mutan Monkey
In the second part of the session, we will visit the Mutan Monkey project. MUTAN- LAB sound research was born in Barcelona, in the beautiful neighborhood of Horta, in 2018. The space was built collectively, DIY/DIT between Mutan Monkey Instruments and the musical collective Ojalä este mi Bici is established as a cultural association of sound research focused on electronics and electroacoustics. The space works in a collective self-management way and wants to promote the exchange of knowledge and the creation of new forms to enable other ways of generating music and experimental sound.
9:30-11:30
Session with Laura Benítez - Beyond local territories
This session focuses on territoriality and third spaces. The proposal addresses notions of territory and community beyond the simple local-global scale. The generation of communities and collaboration does not occur only in encounters within the same territory. We will explore different notions and projects to help us think about a design with others beyond local territories.
11:30-13:30
Visit to BeAnotherLab (TBC)
We will visit the collective/project Be another lab in the second part of the session.
BeAnotherLab works at the intersection of art, science and technology. We question the hierarchies between these different ways of knowing and approach them as complementary, overlapping bodies of knowledge. BeAnotherLab is a not-for-profit cultural association registered in Barcelona. Their innovations are licensed under the Creative Commons Share-Alike License. They are driven by an action-research approach, and the laboratory has developed a range of methodologies for interfacing with differences, always aiming to translate and connect in a context-specific and situated manner.
Methodological Strategies⇝
- Lectures
- Case studies
-
Visits
-
Project-based learning
- Team-based learning
- Visual thinking
Deliverables⇝
One of the deliverables will consist of designing an intervention with a community/collective, considering the lessons learned in the seminar. They will be able to add a critical reflection on how their design practices/experimental practices understand and tackle complex issues through design practices.
Grading Method⇝
| Percentage | Description |
|---|---|
| 20% | Participation |
| 40% | Prototype development |
| 40% | Personal reflections |
European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS)
2 ECTS
Additional Resources⇝
Bibliography⇝
Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning
Care Collective. Care Manifesto. The politics of interdependence
Collins, Nickolas. Hand-made electronic music. The art of hardware hacking
Constanza-Chock, Sasha. Design Justice. Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need
Latour, Bruno; Weibel, Peter. Critical zones
Pappanek, Victor. Design for the real world
Tsing, Anna. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
Faculty⇝
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).