Diseña

Postcards from Inside the Practices

2024-07-22T19:18:42+00:00

PABLO CELIS

'We Made a World,' or How to Correspond with Cigarette Butts

Cigarette butts are residual entities that proliferate incessantly across the world. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted between November 2022 and August 2023 with a science-technology startup dedicated to the revalorization and transformation of cigarette butts, this article analyzes how a correspondence with this object is articulated. Taking the design of a cigarette butt container as a starting point, the aim is to understand how the act of corresponding constitutes a more-than-human entanglement that entails affectations and a desire to learn to coexist with this entity. Finally, it concludes that correspondence opens the possibility of articulating more-than-human coexistences that invite unfinished speculative gestures and practices, thus shaping shared worlds with the non-human.

ANDREA GASPAR

Speculations on the Role of Anthropology in Design

Through the description of my experience as an anthropologist participating in a speculative design workshop, I illustrate how the standardized design method that structures design practice becomes an obstacle to generating an original speculative output. The standard design method is a linear sequence of steps intended to provide a solution to a given problem. Speculative design, however, is supposed to be critical and aims to produce questions rather than solutions to problems. The linearity of the design method does not create space for questioning preconceived ideas and culturally entrenched normative views. Questioning what we take for granted is, however, fundamental for new ideas to emerge; that, I argue, could be the role of anthropology in design.

JOSÉ SÁNCHEZ-LAULHÉ & PAULA FERNÁNDEZ SAN MARCOS

Recovering Disused Infrastructures: The T11 Case and Agonism as the Hidden Face of These Operations

Industrial infrastructures inherited from the 19th and 20th centuries have become an 'obscure object of desire.' Brought out of oblivion by social and neighborhood movements at the end of the 20th century, these spaces for a time offered opportunities to restore, through autonomous self-governance, what was lacking in the urban environment. The New European Bauhaus and other programs have promoted greater dynamism in the recovery of these disused infrastructures, prompting many governments to explore initiatives that adopt this approach. This text draws on the experience of Tejares Once (T11) to shed light on the agonistic efforts involved in moving forward with these initiatives, especially when undertaken from non-hegemonic positions. But this agonistic struggle does not only have negative connotations―it also generates very compelling operations on presence for people with profiles such as that of Alastair Gow, an inseparable element of T11 who eludes any design prerogative that might be proposed.

Inclusion as Agencies in Friction

2025-01-22T00:58:39+00:00

Inclusivity is a contemporary social discourse that calls for practices enabling equal, just, or fair access to resources and opportunities. Designers and researchers are increasingly requested and pressured to take an active role as agents of inclusion. However, many current framings take positive outlooks at face value and do not address the root causes of exclusion. As researchers affiliated with design, we offer a critical discussion of this concept by problematizing and reflexively engaging with it. We position the argument that inclusion is always a meeting of agencies. Instead of striving to adopt and affirm ideal types, we acknowledge the value of recognizing the agencies made visible through frictions, which invite possibilities for negotiation and refusal as outcomes. Hence, inclusion frames relational practices with results that cannot be controlled―meaning that positive and negative effects coexist as part of social dynamism.

Of Touch, Text, and Textile: Imaginative Notes for Other Agencies, Rhythms, and Everyday Life

2025-05-07T22:00:32+00:00

This text-textile offers a situated reflection on textile creation practices as embodied knowledge and as forms of micropolitical, affective, and epistemological recomposition. From a feminist perspective and grounded in our trajectories as researchers and textileras (textile makers), we approach textiles as both material metaphors and sensitive technologies that enable thinking–enacting other relations between bodies, materials, and knowledges. The text is organized into three stitches: (1) textiles in everyday life as practices of the common; (2) touch as an epistemic gesture and the agency of textile matter; and (3) the dissident temporalities enabled by these practices. The text is fashioned as a gesture of disciplinary overflow that challenges established fields of knowledge and design. As a transformative practice, textile work allows for imagining modes of collaborative creation where knowledge becomes body, rhythm, and connection. This text is a work-in-progress fabric, open to further elaboration.

Not Knowing to Reimagine. Toward an Ignorance-Oriented Design in Times of Artificial Intelligence

2025-06-03T17:51:37+00:00

Artificial intelligence (AI) has gained prominence in public debate, not only as a tool to optimize processes, but also as a dominant narrative of development and progress. These imaginaries, grounded in references from the Global North, tend to define the possible and desirable futures of AI in an exclusive manner. With the aim of decentering these hegemonic visions and creating space for a Latin American situated technodiversity, this article analyzes the implementation of an experimental critical design workshop—carried out with actors from the Chilean technological ecosystem—and its failure to generate alternative imaginaries. Based on this experience, a reflection on the role of failure and ignorance in creative practices is proposed. It is argued that the emergence of failure can activate forms of generative ignorance, opening up fertile methodological and analytical spaces for rethinking our relationship with AI. The article conceptualizes the exploratory notion of an ignorance-oriented design: a practice that learns from excess, stays with the trouble, and recognizes the value of what we do not yet know or cannot anticipate. It aims to contribute to a design epistemology that is committed to the possibilities that ignorance introduces to creative processes.

Healing the Earth: Quasi-Living Material Designs that Connect With Each Other and Educate Us in Ecology

2025-06-25T17:47:41+00:00

This article presents a reflection on what it means to educate and how to incorporate ecological issues into architectural practices. It analyzes the experience of an architecture course that simulates interspecies cohabitation processes as attempts at bioremediation in degraded territories, where each designed artifact is not a simple object but vibrant matter that cooperates with a certain degree of responsiveness within the group. The method explores co-design strategies; incorporates play as a way of ‘engaging with’ the landscape; explores the relationship between fabrication techniques and design; and applies kinetic principles to simulate life in the models created. The resulting companion species are assessed through the ecopoethics proposed by Puig de la Bellacasa. The importance of the classroom as a co-production framework, informed by perspectives from science and technology studies, feminism, and environmental humanities, is highlighted.

Designing Shared Worlds: Reflections on a Decolonial Teaching Approach in Architectural Projects

2025-06-27T23:01:21+00:00

This article examines pedagogical transformations in the author’s university teaching practice through an engagement with Brazilian Afro-Indigenous thought and its relationship to decolonial perspectives in design. The article links an encounter with a group of Yawanawá women in the Brazilian Amazon to personal and pedagogical bifurcations that traverse the field of architecture. It analyzes the methodological strategies applied while supervising the Final Degree Projects presented at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), which have fostered a historiographic questioning movement, both in terms of references and methodological practices. It concludes that these pedagogical experiences bring together different logics, including the students’ interest in exploring and experimenting with non-canonical ways of thinking about and practicing architecture in collaboration with situated communities and territories.

The Contradiction of Institutional Diversity in the Design Student Body

2025-07-14T15:21:56+00:00

The United States of America has pioneered initiatives, policies, and pedagogies to diversify its higher education student bodies. In design education, for instance, students are taught to self-represent their cultures and those of their ancestors instead of representing others. Like many activities touched by neoliberal multiculturalism, however, this institutionalization of diversity does not fundamentally alter the historical negative differentiation between student and faculty, White and non-White, or male and female bodies. Following Sarah Ahmed, this autoethnographic militant design research reconceptualizes institutional diversity as a contradiction that can be felt and critically worked by a design student body through collective, not just individual, self-representation.