Skip to content

Syllabus⇝

Design Studio I - Embodied Criticism

MDEF Research, Design and Development studios aim to take areas of research, interests and/or initial project ideas into an advanced stage of the research, with an execution plan. The studio structure in three terms could be understood as follows:

TERM 1 Research: Understanding what it means to design for emergent futures. We achieve this by analyzing the past, finding weak signals, analyzing references and the current state of the art and identifying each one's areas of interest. All of this investigation occurs through experimenting from the first-person perspective.

TERM 2 Design: Forming the present through interventions in the real world. Building the foundations of your design space, forming strategic partnerships. Applying knowledge into practice through iterative prototyping. Testing ideas and prototypes in the real world.

TERM 3 Development: Refining interventions and identifying desirable futures/alternative presents. Establishing roadmaps for the construction of alternative narratives. Communicating and disseminating your project through speculative design.

Fab Lab Barcelona (IAAC) & Fab City Foundation

The first term Design Studio aims to create a solid ground for the students to start developing their projects. Weekly activities will be set to interlink results from the courses like their mappings, cartographies, experiments, 1st person design activities, prototypes, with their personal development plan. In order to propose an area of intervention at the end of the trimester. The Design Studio activities will consist of presentations, group activities, short exercises and personal coaching.

Keywords: Prototyping, 1st Person Research through Design, Design Space, Documentation and Communication, Design Interventions

Learning Objectives⇝

The specific goals are the following:

  1. To develop a critical position within the student’s design practice.
  2. Define possible areas of intervention, based on the Atlas of the Week Signals.
  3. Generate design spaces which allows to prototype with context, direction and understanding.
  4. To build personal and collective repositories of resources.

Schedule⇝

Schedule: Each session will start with a 90-minutes presentation of the previous exercise and feedback.

Landing Kick off - Collective Map of Individual Ref-Points

Goals: To cross affectivity, situated criticality and site-specific sensitivity in order to define a series of referential places, which define you as a political, social and creative being.

Activity: Map 10 different places from your "techno-bio-physical-social" environment with a special importance for your creative agency. Work in the collective map interface previously delivered to all the students.

Deliverable: 10 geo-located points in the collective map of ref-points: each point has to be labeled with a specific title and description according to the previously determined graphic code. Prepare a short (up to 5mins) presentation showing the 5 most important points.

Embodied Criticism I: Position Yourself

Class: Critical Perspectives (situatedness and contextuality, revision of theoretical and practical framework) Climatic Justice/ Decolonial theories and necropolitics/ Queer Failure and speculative feminism.

Activity:

  1. Choose a context of interest (socio-bio-techno-political, both physical and/or digital, etc.). Develop a site-specific research methodology to study this context from a 1PP approach.
  2. Write a manifest: what do you care about, what drives you crazy, what makes you dream, etc.

Deliverable:

  1. Choose a context of interest (socio-bio-techno-political, both physical and/or digital, etc.). Develop a site-specific research methodology to study this context from a 1PP approach.
  2. Write a manifest: what do you care about, what drives you crazy, what makes you dream, etc.

Embodied Criticism II: Prototype an action

Class: Performative criticality: embodied actions of resistance and desire (Architecture of Action: Syntax of six typologies of actions).

Activity:

  1. Prototype an embodied action of resistance and/ or desire.

  2. Test at least three different prototypes.

  3. Study their interrelationship with the context. What do they enact? Transformations, errors, exceptions.

Deliverable: Document your first prototypes based on the following index of contents:

  • Conceptual Definition: 150w. context to intervene, problematics, potentials, objectives, etc.

  • 3 x Hypothesis: design and develop at least three different hypothesis based on the conceptual statement

  • 3 x Prototypes: audiovisual documentation of the prototypes’ development + critical evaluation

Embodied Criticism III: Act Individually

Class: Protocols for critical actions. Critical engagement with plural contexts. Site-specificity and institutional critique. Guest lecturer: Luz Broto

Activity: Develop a protocol for an individual action. Perform it. Document it.

Deliverable:

  1. Detailed protocol per steps and phases

  2. Audiovisual documentation of the implementation: context activation, ad-hoc designed and developed artifacts, process documentation (develop a proper methodology for systematic documentation)

Embodied Criticism III: Act collectively

Class: Multiscalar collective practices of wellbeing and resistance. Guest Lecturer: La Cuarta Piel

Activity: Create a relationship of trust of a specific collective of interest (human, non-human, physical, digital, etc.). Develop a protocol for collective action. Perform it. Document it.

Deliverable:

  1. Detailed protocol per steps and phases
  2. Activation of an affective relationship to a collective of interest: why this community, how do you contribute, why do they need your activation, what are your collective objectives (not only yours)
  3. Audiovisual documentation of the implementation: context activation, ad-hoc designed and developed artifacts, process documentation (develop a proper methodology for systematic documentation)

Design Dialogues Preparation

Goals: Create a collective and individual building up plan for the Design Dialogues exhibition.

Activity: Group dynamic to create themes and groups of projects for the exhibition.

Deliverable 1: Planning of the exhibition, space allocation and special needs.

Deliverable 2: Work on the Design Dialogues deliverables.

Design Dialogues

Goals: to present collective areas of intervention and to present the first experiments at a personal and collective level, and in an immediate context. To produce the first group exhibition of the master’s projects.

Deliverables:

  1. A series of prototypes presented in a collective design space and a personal video of no more than 3 minutes (answering the question what is your updated purpose).
  2. 5 high resolution images of the highlights of your Design Studio work during the term, a high resolution image of your personal and collective design space and the first chapters of your Publication which represent each one of the deliverables developed during the term.

Deliverables⇝

Deliverables for after the holidays (Submission deadline, January 7th)

  • 5 high resolution images of the highlights of your Design Studio work during the term
  • 1 high resolution image of your personal and collective design space
  • First chapter of your Publication (TBD)

Evaluation Strategies⇝

  • Relevance of the project in relation to the weak signals
  • Framing of the opportunity through the Collective Design Space
  • Involvement of the community through the collective interventions

Grading Method⇝

Percentage Description
50% Faculty (including written assignment and website documentaiton)
50% Self-Evaluation

European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS)

10 ECTS

Additional Resources⇝

1. Embodied Criticism I: Position Yourself

Situatedness, contextuality, climatic justice, decolonial theories, necropolitics, queer failure, speculative feminism:

  • Haraway, Donna. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 1988.
  • Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton University Press, 2015.
  • Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Duke University Press, 2019.
  • Povinelli, Elizabeth. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Duke University Press, 2016.
  • Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Duke University Press, 2011.
  • Braidotti, Rosi. Posthuman Feminism. Polity, 2022.

2. Embodied Criticism II: Prototype an Action

Performative criticality, embodied resistance and desire, architectures of action:

  • Lepecki, André. Exhausting Dance. Routledge, 2006.
  • Butler, Judith. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Harvard University Press, 2015.
  • Manning, Erin. Relationscapes. MIT Press, 2009.
  • Rogoff, Irit. Smuggling—An Embodied Criticality. eipcp.net, 2006.
  • Springgay, Stephanie, and Sarah E. Truman. Walking Methodologies in a More-than-Human World. Routledge, 2018.

3. Embodied Criticism III: Act Individually

Protocols for critical actions, site-specificity, institutional critique:

  • Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells. Verso, 2012.
  • Kester, Grant. The One and the Many. Duke University Press, 2011.
  • Rendell, Jane. Site-Writing. I.B. Tauris, 2010.
  • Foucault, Michel. Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias. 1984.

4. Embodied Criticism IV: Act Collectively

Multiscalar collective practices, wellbeing and resistance, trust and care:

  • Escobar, Arturo. Designs for the Pluriverse. Duke University Press, 2018.
  • Federici, Silvia. Re-enchanting the World. PM Press, 2018.
  • Puig de la Bellacasa, María. Matters of Care. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
  • Guattari, Félix. The Three Ecologies. Bloomsbury, 2000 [1989].
  • Berlant, Lauren. The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times. Environment and Planning D, 2016.

5. Design Research & First-Person Methodologies

Speculative design, HCI, prototyping, experiential futures, first-person perspectives:

  • Auger, James. (2010). Alternative presents and speculative futures: Designing fictions through the extrapolation and evasion of product lineages. Negotiating Futures – Design Fiction, 42–57.
  • Candy, Stuart, & Dunagan, Jake. (2017). Designing an experiential scenario: The People Who Vanished. Futures, 86, 136–153.
  • Desjardins, Audrey, Tomico, Oscar, Lucero, Andrés, Cecchinato, Marta, & Neustaedter, Carman. (2021). Introduction to the special issue on first-person methods in HCI. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), 28(6), 1–12. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3492342
  • Diez, Tomas, & Tomico, Oscar. (2020). The Master in Design for Emergent Futures. IAAC.
  • Hiltunen, Elina. (2010). Weak signals in organizational futures learning. Doctoral Thesis. Aalto University.
  • Krogh, Peter, Markussen, Thomas, & Bang, Anne. (2015). Ways of drifting – 5 methods of experimentation in research through design. In Proceedings of ICoRD’15. Springer, 39–50.
  • Lucero, Andrés, Desjardins, Audrey, Neustaedter, Carman, Höök, Kristina, Hassenzahl, Marc, & Cecchinato, Marta. (2019). A sample of one: First-person research methods in HCI. In DIS ’19 Companion. ACM, 385–388.
  • Neustaedter, Carman, & Sengers, Phoebe. (2012). Autobiographical design: What you can learn from designing for yourself. Interactions, 19(6), 28–33.
  • Rosenberg, Daniel. (2015). Transformational Design: A mindful practice for experience-driven design. PhD Thesis. MIT.
  • Tomico, Oscar, Winthagen, Victor, & van Heist, Maarten. (2012). Designing for, with or within: 1st, 2nd and 3rd person points of view on designing for systems. In NordiCHI ’12. ACM, 180–188.
  • Varela, Francisco, & Shear, Jonathan. (1999). First-person methodologies: What, why, how? Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6(2–3), 1–14.
  • Wakkary, Ron. (2021). Things We Could Design: For more than human-centered worlds. MIT Press.
  • Wensveen, Stephan, & Matthews, Ben. (2015). Prototypes and prototyping in design research. In Rodgers, P. & Yee, J. (Eds.), Routledge Companion to Design Research. Routledge, 262–276.

More to be provided along the course

Faculty⇝

Manuela Valtchanova

Manuela Valtchanova

Architect, researcher and professor. PhD in Aesthetics and Theory of Arts. Her area of ​​work is based on the critical transaction between politics, space and affect, with a special interest in the possibilities of direct action. In her professional career, she carries out projects that address heterogeneous architectural and artistic formats between temporary interventions in public space and socio-spatial practices of collaboration and mapping. She has been visiting professor and guest lecturer at universities worldwide and she has published both specialized articles and book chapters, mainly addressing counterdisciplinary strategies through direct action, cartographies, embodied exploration and performative criticality.

Saúl Baeza

Saúl Baeza

MDEF Co-Director

Saúl Baeza is DOES and MAYBE Creative Director, VISIONS BY Founder and Editor-in-chief and VIBE content director. While lecturing at Elisava Barcelona University of Design and Engineering he also researches functional and digital identities as part of the “Making with..." Research Group (TU Eindhoven Research) and "Futures Now" Research Group (Elisava Research). Saúl is the co-director of the Master in Design For Emergent Futures (MDEF), organised by the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) and Elisava Barcelona School of Design and Engineering, in collaboration with the Fab Academy. Saúl has been visiting professor and lecturer at international universities, educational institutions and cultural venues such as Harvard GSD, Central Saint Martins and London College of Communication (UAL), Institute for advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC), RMIT University Melbourne, Rhode Island School of Design, Pascual Bravo University in Medellín, Sónar+D, Victoria&Albert Museum, CCCB and DHUB, among others.