Future Talks
#1 Design with values¶
Intrduction to distributed design¶
we start the talk introducing the Distributed Design Platform as a way to develop and promote the connection between designers, makers and emerging digital and local markets.
Reflection Tree¶
I based the Reflection Tree self-assessment on my three-year thesis project: i.e. the conception of a production method involving the reuse of fabric leftovers and generative design methodology in order to create a design product
It was an interesting activity because it made me break down my project and self-evaluate it according to the parameters of open source, collaboration, social, environmental and value regeneration, and inclusiveness. The evaluation revealed the strengths and weaknesses of the project, and the activity made me reflect on how I could improve and implement my project in the future.
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key takeaways The section where I gained the most points is the Environmentally regenerative section precisely because the project I selected was based on this type of values and pushes to increasingly use the available technological knowledge to increase the life cycle of a material and thus the circular economy. so I am happy that my project reflects the environmental and design innovation values mentioned in the reflection tree. Secondly, the area most lacking is that of inclusivity: although the project could be attentive to the material cycle and the use of innovative techniques for non-industrial but customised production, it is a little far from expanding the target audience, which at the moment is still niche despite the fact that the project communication is available to all. In addition, the technology assumed for production is high-end, so that also restricts the accessibility for users. I would therefore also like to take these aspects into consideration in the future
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Reflection I think that the Reflection Tree is a really good to to use in order to understande how a project is accessible or environmentally generative or inclusive. It helped me to understand what were pros and cons of my project but especially, made me reflect on what i could improve.
Saul Baeza, around Hospitalet¶
DOES is a design and consultancy practice exploring the potentials of digital and functional identities in different scales and media. Combining design, research, academic, curatorial and editorial activities, our interests lie in developing concepts that involve materials and technologies with body and mind.
With Saul we toured the Hospitalet de LLobergat and he showed us the highlights of the city and where the city’s studios and art centres are located. I find L’H to be a great place to start your artistic journey because it is really full of interesting and creative people, the spaces are also original and inclusive!
Also, Saul showed us his work as DOES WORK and for Visions by.
I really like and am interested in Saul’s work because it reflects themes such as digital survaillance, identity, the body, etc. in an aesthetically and design-wise innovative way.
For this reason, Few weeks later, I attended one of his workshops to contribute to his doctoral thesis. It was a speculation on digital camouflage related to facial recognition. Saul has made facial prostheses in the past that would allow facial identity to be unrecognised by FACE ID, even to be used only by FACE ID to allow facial identity to be kept private.
During the workshop we were asked to think of a concept and make these prostheses:
I associated this experience with my project and thought about the cases in which being filmed and surveilled is positive, in other words, in cases of violence: it has happened more than several times that the murderer or aggressor could be traced because he was filmed by security cameras. So my prosthesis rather than being made to hide was to show off.
Hellen Torres, For More Than Human-Centered Worlds¶
Respons-ability→
Anthropocene→ (present time of the antropos→ humans as a species), haraway said is a bad way of calling the era,
humanity is not the problem but “man”, as individuals,
The problem is not humanity “Most peoples on this planet have not lived and exercised the same kinds of processes that break generations, that radically simplify ecologies, that drastically force labor in a mass way that creates a kind of global transformation and global wealth that is in and of itself genocidal and extinctionist. That is not a species act; it’s a situated historical set of conjunctures, and I think to this day the term Anthropocene makes it harder, not easier, for people to understand that.”
human exceptionalism The sciences of the Anthropocene are too much contained within restrictive systems theories and within evolutionary theories called the Modern Synthesis, which for all their extraordinary importance have proven unable to think well about sympoiesis, symbiosis, symbiogenesis, development, webbed ecologies, and microbes.
suggestions:
symbiosis→ close relationship between two organisms and share the same environment, human body full of complementary bacteria, it’s proposed for a new era
darwin idea of evolution was about competitions between individuals of the4 same species for surviving, but symbiosis promotes collaboration
symbiogenesis→ two entieties are merging and the for a new one
Critters→ American everyday idiom for varmints of all sorts. Scientists talk of their “critters” all the time; and so do ordinary people all over the U.s., but perhaps especially in the South. The taint of “creatures” and “creation” does not stick to “critters”; if you see such a semiotic barnacle, scrape it off. In this book, “critters” refers promiscuously to microbes, plants, animals, humans and nonhumans, and sometimes even to machines.
semiotic materials(flesh and science)
involution→ unfolding
Individuals → holobionts
Like Margulis, I use holobiont to mean symbiotic assemblages, at whatever scale of space or time, which are more like knots of diverse intra-active relatings in dynamic complex systems, than like the entities of a biology made up of preexisting bounded units (genes, cells, organisms, etc.) in interactions that can only be conceived as competitive or cooperative.
sympoiesis→ ut means making with, nothing makes itself
Sympoiesis is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems. It is a word for worlding-with, in company.(in a science fiction way)
we can not fix the problem but instead staying with the trouble, so creating collaborations and combinations, be responsible of our interspecies relationships.
making oddkin→ make kin of inventive connections
Respons-ability→ about both absence and presence, living and nursing
- cultivating the capacity for response.
- response-ability focuses not on being responsible but on learning how to respond and being opened for different kinds of responses, taking into account that not only humans call and not only humans respond.
- How we pay attention affects whether we can hear these calls and how we learn to respond (Vinciane Despret).
Haraway insists that response-ability is not only cultivated in labs, on agility training courses, or in other multi-species encounters, but also in the way we tell stories.
SUMMARY:
Anthropocene → need to response
Problems to be solved → “Staying with the trouble”
Humans → holobionts
Responsibility → response-ability
Task → making oddkin
Krzysztof Wronski, what about after MDEF¶
Krzysztof practically told us about his life before and after MDEF: he told us what he did before and what he specialised in, from product design to IU/UX design, brand identities and working for companies… and then after the master’s degree we ask ourselves, what now?
MDEF is an ‘anything is possible’ bubble in which we float for 8 months and convince ourselves that everything we do is OK.
Which it is, but in what terms?
This master’s degree does not tell you “you are wrong” but makes you realise that everything you produce is useful to yourself and others in a different way and encourages you to challenge yourself and your surroundings all the time.
Krzysztof explained to us that the post-MDEF crisis is normal because we thought and prototyped and hypothesised so much during the master’s course, but coming out of this bubble is not so easy.
The secret is to take the interdisciplinarity and mental elasticity that the master’s course gave us and apply it in the outside world: in my opinion it is important to take the skills acquired and preserve and improve them. This period was also a time to focus on aspects of design (or anything else) that were not closely related to my background and that without this course I would probably never have explored due to lack of time and resources. So MDEF makes you grow in terms of knowledge and methodologies that are fundamental in the world we live in today and hopefully also in the future.