design studio and design dialogues
13th to 22nd December 2021
faculty: Oscar Tomico, Mariana Quintero
week reflections
For the last design studio of the term, we had to do a collective design intervention together with our group.I am part of a group interested in the topics of learning ( see here the description of the challenge we want to solve).
We were interested in rethinking what we learn, how we learn it and how to go beyond school “walls” for learning. We decided that for this intervention we were gonna use visual mapping to put light on individual learning journeys. We started by doing our own maps. The idea was to map from the moment we were born to today, all the key moments of learning, the important moments that shaped us, the triggers that made us take a direction or another.
We wanted to collect more of these maps and organized a pop up activity in a café in Barcelona and in Jardin Mariposas in Poblenou where we exposed the maps done by us and our friends and invited people interested to do it too. After each map drawing we asked the participants to tell us about their journey. This sharing moment ended up being as important as the mapping moment and we were surprised on how personal the stories shared were even with participants we had just met.
The feedback from the participants was in general that they enjoyed the activity and had never had the occasion to reflect on their journey in this way. Among the participants, one of them was a school teacher and proposed to host the activity in his class with his students who are around 12-13 years old. We will probably organize it with him in January.
For us, this activity contributes to show that our paths are not linear and seeing other people’s complex path can be inspiring.
what could be next
a methodology of self-discovery? We realized when doing it that this methodology was useful for people to know what they know. By doing this, we are proposing another way to validate knowledge beyond the traditional educating system. We could target specific groups for whom it would be particularly useful: young generations when they are wondering about their future and have to make choices about studies, jobless persons when having difficulties finding their paths and don’t have a visibility on their strengths and interests...a way to create a network of learning around school If we decide to focus on schools, this exercice could be a way to create new connections within schools. When the students will make their own mappings, it will show their interests and we could contribute to the creation of a learning network outside outside of school but connected to the schools.
a platform of mini-challenges / micro-learnings To go from an individual exercice to a collective learning experience, we could create some sort of participatory platform where people could share their individual experiences but also be inspired by others. From your own mapping exercice, you could create a “bubble” of micro-learning content that would become accessible to others.
design dialogues
collective intervention For Design Dialogues on the 22nd of December, we made laser cut challenge cards inspired from quotes of individual learning paths we had discovered the past weeks during our interventions. The objective was to make tangible the possible learnings and propose a way to go from an individual story to an opportunity for a collective learning. We also proposed to the guests of the Design Dialogues to draw their own individual maps.individual interventions We also made a collective spot that we called “public space hacking” where we showed individual project that had in common the fact of questionning the public space. I displayed there the video of the individual intervention I did a few weeks back on cooking in the streets of Barcelona, in spots not made for it.
individual prototypes I also displayed during Design Dialogues two prototypes I did during this first term: the bike planter (link) and a seed walled. Both of them question the link we maintain with nature in our urban environment. For this I imagined a collection of unusual spaces to grow plants and make them visible in the city: a seed wallet to make seed exchange a normal habit, a vest to wear on top of your clothes with spaces to grow plants or carry seeds around...
bike planter: As my bike is my main means of transportation in the city, I created an artifact to grow food on my bike and carry it around with me everywhere I go.
seed wallet: What if we all carried seeds in a wallet in our bags and were able to exchange them freely? I sewed this transparent wallet to open the conversation around seed monopolies preventing farmers to use the seeds they want. Big corporations are today controlling what seeds can be used and how, and consequently many crops varieties have now disappeared.
new fight
We all created new fight posters and attached them in the expo, mirroring the posters we made in September.Even though I was part of a collective focused on alternative ways of learning, I know I will want to focus of the topic of Rural Futures for next term as I feel I have a stronger interest in this.
In parallel of the collective projects, I have been mapping the ecosystem of actors working on the topic of rural/urban and food sovereignty in Barcelona and met with some people too.
