Design With Others

1. About

The Design with Others seminar is a week filled with different kinds of approaches to understanding how the design field has an impact, and consequences in the real world how our biases, and morals, act as lenses to understand the reality we live in, and how to break or reframe them to polish our vision to aim a different path considering new references and approaches are we exposed to. On each day of this seminar, we went through various places with artists and designers who explored new system architecture to sustain their practice and manage the consequences of their acts with the materials they use and the communities they approach.

2. Martha

Along this journey, some reflections popped into my mind and the most important one was the urgency to change established systems and how they affect our lives, as capitalism and social normative standards are connected through the world and everything that enmeshes the reality we are subjected to. Martha showed us an important vision considering the importance of being conscious when designing something and understanding its possible future consequences creating objective questions that stand out the wicked problems and who are the ones affected by them. However, design as practice and process to develop certain objects, services, interactions, and even new rules, is still subject to the adhesion of a market that uses what was once projected to the world, something that involves the public, target audience, and other marketing studies that turns ideas feasible. As a consequence, it's important to think about who we want out of it, who are we including, and why those decisions are being made.

Martha

Design Justice

Dating apps

Design Language

Metrics for reflection

3. Óscar Martín & Marzia Matarese

With Oscar and Marzia, the idea of relating ourselves with non-humans was the highlight of the conversation to understand how we perceive the external that is not similar, and why we behave and act differently close to different species, mainly emotionally and semantically speaking. The idea of understanding and even conceiving machines to embrace our differences has a remarkable and important discussion, however, I felt during a huge part of the time, the anthropization of certain living beings, the idea of mirroring feelings and even romantically envisioning nature, something that doesn't apply entirely to reality, considering the destructive and constructive nature of biology itself. Maybe we don't need to act romantically with nature, but let it be how it should be. As an artistic approach, it is truly important to reframe the balance between species, but it's important to understand nature as it is, and not necessarily humans as us.

Biology with care

Relation to the Material

Artistic Approach

Slime

Mycelium

Hair

Violence

Anthropomorphizing

Creating semantics

People trying to feel good about themselves

4. Roberto

At Mutan Monkey I felt a brave spirit of collective action, about embracing causes by not being alone and making feasible possibilities that try to disrupt normalities by playing within the game to spread a different vision inside the field that allows different thoughts, methods processes, and social action through shared experiences. Consequently, I saw a more realistic perspective on having a team by sharing values and interests with a spirit constructed by the objects and services that are provided to society by a specific community that communicates with others within the music field. Despite its complicated reality, music has been standing up against the normalities by breaking industry expectations and reshaping its form under the pressure of social movements.

Collective

Band as business

Contribution

Sense of partnerships

Business models

Indie Vibes

5. Arnau Sala

At last with Arnau Sala, the idea and concepts of degrowth were truly emphasized following the line of disrupting capitalist systems brought by the other speakers during the journey, a talk exemplified by collectives and artistic practices implemented in Europe considering how political and economic systems work together to encourage local community actions by sharing and spreading the problems by people and its similarities. Consequently, it's important to ask how much of those interventions can be considered a privilege inside of its system as a European scenario within developed countries with more accessibility to innovative education and so on, a very different perspective from other underdeveloped countries where the majority of citizens can't have critical thinking.

"Good" artistic practices

Be conscient of other parameters

Collective power (once again - community behavior)

Against systems any time

People trying to break something they can't break

What's good? What's bad?

It reminded me of land artists

Degrowth

6. Reflection

In the end from the whole experience across the week, it's more than important to curate, select, and understand which of the information around the vast cloud of repetitive words is being understood by by comparing different kinds of context and moving your first perspective to other individuals with different experiences. A lot of the examples across each speaker had a very rebellious soul, a perspective of change and being aware of the problems surrounding them, and a will to break boundaries, however, even with a rebel soul, it's important to understand the nuances and transitional colors that compose our changes in the world, the importance of seeing things as the process of constantly social change but not necessarily evolution as humans.

Besides trying to correct our mistakes, the idea of a better world is implicitly built with an abstract vision to avoid entropy, ignoring physics and time. As humans, we always had a vision of what was supposed to be an ideal world across history, but the truth lies in the idea that perfection doesn't exist and will never be a reality since we will never have a reference to that. Even with the utopias inside our hearts, it's important to understand and reflect that most of these perspectives are human and that the world never needed us to begin with.

Most people don't accept other natural logic of behavior

Fantasy about a neutral reality against

European privilege | comparison

Names very used | new names

Curation of information

People still focused on maintaining their culture

Break the new norm?

A system against capitalism?

Capitalism self-consumes

Black and White, not so much transition

Being aware