01. design studio ll

From this point forth, the project will start to shape up with a new perspective acquired after the design dialogs reviewers feedback and the personal reflections that followed. Nevertheless, the base concept remains. The focus of this project is people, public space and collectiveness.

Following the first term culmination and the corresponding feedback and analysis that followed, the decision was made that, in order for the project to deliver an outcome that aligns with the principles and ideological positioning of the researcher towards society, it had to be rethought and conceptualized accordingly from the beginning. This process developed as follows.

Taking from the three interventions performed in the first term of the design studio seminar, it became clear that the research approach was coherent to the project's goals from the beginning (1pp intervention) but then deviated in the urge to obtain results and engage with real people in a short time in the subsequent two interventions. And so, the research approach will recap from that checkpoint’s conclusions. This is not to say that the other two interventions will not be taken into consideration in any way. The insights gained from these actions helped shape the conceptual framing of this project and are part of the full process.

A second aspect that arose in the rethinking process, especially from the first person perspective approach and then becoming clear in the selected locations for the first intervention of the current term, is the researcher’s attraction to the peripheries. This brought into the conversation the concept of positioning. This positioning refers not only to a geographical area of interest but an ideological positioning, a conceptual positioning. What it means to be in the city peripheries, in the legal peripheries, in the attention focus’ peripheries.

01_01_intervention_finding

full documentation coming soon. sorry for the inconvenience

1. aproach

2. location

3. engage

3.1. participate

exploring alternative presents

Present Continuities:

The neighborhood community of La Florida, Barcelona has conflict between different groups regarding the use of public spaces. These conflicts result in the municipality imposing hostile architecture techniques in public areas to avoid gatherings, widening the gap between groups and diminishing the quality of these spaces.

Alternative Present:

The neighborhood community of La Florida, Barcelona has conflict between different groups regarding the use of public spaces. These conflicts are mediated within the community through collective creativity and collaboration, resulting in alternative solutions to enhance public space use and appropriation so that the municipality can then intervene in these areas taking from the proposals brought by the community itself.

Interventions that support this alternative present:

1. Immersive research in the context: Sustained presence in different neighbourhood activities to understand their dynamics.

2. Active participation in neighborhood manifestations.

3. Article collaboration in neighborhood magazine to broaden dialog with the community.

ethics of design in human-technical cognitive assemblages

1. Evaluate the following aspects in relation to your project: What assumptions –about goodness, justice, society…– are implicit in its conception (meta-ethics)? What guidelines or norms should be followed during its development (normative ethics)? What criteria could be established to assess its consequences, and what protocols would you apply in case of negative outcomes (applied ethics)?

Referring to the developing project in this course, design justice seems to be the most relevant aspect of meta-ethics as this project explores accessibility to design through grassroots creativity and communal collaboration focusing on peripheral communities that integrate latin american migrant groups. Understanding design justice as the process of rethinking the discipline to center marginalized groups from the design conversation to create collaboration, makes it very clear that it is implicit in the project's conception.

Nevertheless it has become clear throughout the process that constant reevaluation of these principles are needed to ensure that they are part of the conception, development and outcome. Design justice could not only be implemented as a guideline to create but as a tool to measure its implementation along the entire exercise.

Following this idea of constant check-ups of the design justice principles implied in the project, from a personal point of view the most valid criteria there could be established to assess its effects is the one given by the community themselves. This benign a project that aims to be a collaborative distributed network between different stakeholders working at eye-level in a horizontal way, the checking up and assessment should be in the hands of the community.

There should be parameters crafted collectively between the researcher and the community that could be used as a tool to keep the project in line, under community assessment.

01_02_intervention_immersing

full documentation coming soon. sorry for the inconvenience

research design

1. Formulate your research questions / hypothesis

This project explores how collaboration, open knowledge, and grassroots creativity can make design accessible to everyone.

2. Theoretical framework

● Community-Led Initiatives
● Tactical urbanism
● Collective intelligence
● Situated knowledges for design processes
● Distributed design practices
● Open source
● Commons in design

a. Summarize your theoretical framework* (max. 5 lines)

The theoretical framework for this project merges a series of concepts that relate to communities and informality such as, community-led initiatives, collective intelligences, situated knowledge for design processes and proposes an application of these concepts through methods like tactical urbanism, distributed design, and the commons in design ideology.

3. Methods

Informality as a method:
This method argues that communities in precarious and unattended areas are too dynamic for authorities to respond to their necessities. This accentuates the importance of informality as a change agent for communities to evolve and resolve their own situations parallel to what the authorities do.

reflection here

01_03_intervention_carnivalizing

01_04_workshop talk

pictorial

draft 2

overlap