design studio kick-off - reframing
11th to 25th of January 2022
faculty: Oscar Tomico, Mariana Quintero
reflection on term 1 - what has changed in my practice
connecting my personal and professional identityI really appreciated during this first term the approach that led to our projects : Mixing issues we feel concerned about that come to our society and environmental context (identifying weak signals), with our experience, past projects, and individual interests. I feel that it leads to much more meaningful and personal projects and that is something that I was missing in my previous experience and I would like to keep working that way. Using a tool to make these connections visual happened to be very useful too (In our case we used Miro to create these Design spaces).
designing from a first person perspective
Just as we cannot separate our personal from our professional identity, it would not make sense to ignore the designer’s influence on the design. During my professional experience, involving all the communities affected by a particular issue is already something I am used to doing as I worked in a living lab with open innovation approaches. However, I used to look at situations from a neutral perspective during ‘user research’ steps for example. During this first term, being part of my research as a subject and not a neutral observer has brought many new perspectives.
building a community of practice
Working on these projects and interventions as a collective was very motivating throughout this first term. Being in our tematic collectives or in the class as a whole, I felt like I could learn from others, find ideas of collaboration and new projects. It creates an amazing dynamic or “virtuous circle” and gave me the impression that our projects could go much further and scale benefiting from this collaboration. Of course it is also related to the fact that a lot of us share similar visions of how we would like to see the society and really enjoy thinking about new models for the near future.
In the future and after MDEF, I want to continue working with a collective of persons sharing the same vision and with different skills and experience.
ideas for a first intervention in term 2
As explained in the final reflection of term 1, 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 this second term as I feel I have a stronger interest in this.There are different topics that I would like to address with a potential intervention.
Here is a link to my new design space, I created a new one with the topics I want to continue exploring during Term 2.
The main topics will be autonomy, rural futures, food sovereignty.
I am still researching and starting to engage with communities for the rural futures topic without yet having an intervention in mind. I just joined a consumer cooperative in Gracia where a group of people buy directly from a producer based in Maresme and started a few years ago his ecologic exploitation. So my next steps to explore this topic will be meeting with this producer and other people that initiated agricultural projects in Catalunya to find out how I could contribute and get involved in this movement.
Concerning autonomy and self organized communities, I would like to experiment creating new cooperation dynamics at the scale of my building.
If, like most people in cities, I don't have the opportunity to live in a cooperative house, what can I do in my building? How to create more meaningful relationships with people who live around us?
A first step would be to create a poster to invite neighbors to have a discussion and see what they are willing to "share". It could be at the same time a way to create new social ties and lean towards more sustainable habits (find ways to to limit our energy consumption at the scale of the building, share objects, buy in bulk from organic producers...)
I would also like to start the initiative with others from the MDEF collective in their buildings to be able to compare and try different things. First ideas and inspirations are documented on my design space here.
