Diseña

Postcards from Inside the Practices

Alicia Lazzaroni — 2025-02-01

ALICIA LAZZARONI & ANTONIO BERNACCHI

The Problem Space We Cohabit: Inter-Methodological Approaches for More-Than-Human Design

A shift to an ecological and critical perspective in design calls for a profound methodological restructuring of its disciplines, towards a condition of methodological hybridity and contamination. We propose the notion of ‘exploration space’ to identify a heterogeneous landscape of interacting design process, while making reference to the concepts of ‘inter-disciplinary research’ and ‘problem space’ discussed by Celia Lury. As an example, a series of design explorations delving into more-than-human coexistence, developed by the authors, are recalled to map out and diagram methodological feedback loops.

ENRIQUE ESPINOSA PÉREZ

Domestic Mediations: Tricks, Hacks, Memes, and Mattress Exchanges as Minor Architectures

This multimodal article reflects on the insufficient consideration of (architectural) design as an ‘object-centered discipline’. Through the case of a small apartment renovation, it examines how the analysis of the triad―client (owner), designer (architect), and project (design)―fails to effectively describe the ecosystemic relationships that occur in a (domestic) codesign process, proposing that design is mediation and intra-action. The study, therefore, brings together agents (regulations, hacks, agreements, and agents); resources (affections, desires, frustrations, communication channels, economic precariousness, etc.); and actions (agreements, exchanges, self-constructions, doubts, and decisions) that go beyond the client-technician or problem-solution relationships.

LYDIA MARIA ARANTES & MICHELE FEDER-NADOFF

Making Things, Making Sense: Reflecting on the silence in-between Structures and Anti-Structures of Education

This zine-like article presents and enacts a reflection upon a three-session panel the authors convened at the recent Royal Anthropological Institute conference on Anthropology and Education. Their reflection coalesces through a more casual conversation, capturing their exchange and collaboration process. The authors contrast their Antistructure approach to education with the Structure approach. In the panel, they challenged the framework of a formal conference by focusing on silence in education, and concluded their panel with an embroidery lab designed to be both experiential and experimental. This article shares what the authors learned by moving away from the conventional approach to learners as vessels to be filled. Instead, their panel was designed to explore making-knowledge with others in a manner that is improvisatory, non-authoritative, and open to the silence of gestures and quiet exchange.

Editorial: Affirmation? How to Learn to Live with ‘The Others’ Through Design

Enrique Nieto Fernández — 2025-02-01

We approach design practices as practices of re-composition that ‘design’ encounters between entities with lives, interests, risks, materialities, politics, scales, and temporalities that are highly heterogeneous. This proposal draws attention to the responsibility of design in a world marked by an increasing ecosocial crisis, which demands not so much an improvement in our ability to design for others, but rather to live with others ‘through’ design. We will meet with disobedient ants, cultural management, invasive plants, ancestral knowledges, unstable amphibians, women’s communities, changing climates, Indigenous peoples, environments, and publics that—all together—design a ‘we’ that is always in formation, affecting the places where we work, the studios where we design, the classrooms where we learn, or the epistemologies from which we articulate our relationship with otherness.

Community Culture and Design in (Re)Territorialization Processes: Devices and Narratives of Memory, Rootedness, and Resilience

Alicia Morales-Pereyra — 2025-02-01

In 2021, the Canary Island of La Palma experienced a volcanic eruption that lasted 85 days, forcing the relocation of over seven thousand people, two thousand of whom were unable to return to their homes. Within this complex and conflict-laden context of collective healing, we explore a design contribution through cultural and artistic creation as a sociomaterial assembly. Drawing on situated research conducted primarily with women from the rural periphery, this article examines the design of encounters, listening spaces, and networks of affection and care that foster the collection of ancestral knowledge and strengthen collective rootedness. The continuity of the domestic dimension within public spaces is analyzed, with the (sobre)mesa (table talk) serving as both an object and a context in dynamic processes of (re)territorialization.

Undisciplinary Reflections on the Artistic Creation of Biotopes for Ants, Plants, and Humans

Santiago Morilla — 2025-02-01

This article discusses Static Cycle-Biotope for Ants, Plants, and Humans (2024), an interactive eco-art installation that creates a biotope for a biological community containing both plants and Messor barbarus ants. This dynamic space encourages collaboration and mutual observation, questioning the division between nature and culture and exploring the shared agency between humans and other living beings. In its version installed at the Museum of Science and Water in Murcia, the public pedals to maintain the ecosystem, exploring intra-actions, according to Karen Barad’s theoretical framework. The artwork critiques traditional causality, proposing a relational ontology that reveals how human and non-human actions co-constitute shared realities that are shaped as interfaces of inter-species cooperation that, in turn, promote the production of a biophilic subjectivity.

Reimagining and Decolonizing the Language of Design

Nidhi Singh Rathore — 2025-02-01

This article examines how traditional design methodologies predominantly serve Western and colonial interests, urging designers to rethink their foundations through decolonial theories and methods. By grounding the research in the context of migration between Mexico and the United States, it dives into a case study, proposes textiles and cultural artifacts as design tools, and offers a methodology rooted in oral histories, traditions, and localized design approaches. Using untailored faldas (skirts) as a narrative canvas, it demonstrates an alternative approach to design research that emphasizes learning from collaborative storytelling. The methodology centers on three critical principles: a deep immersion in the research context; conceptualizing stories and experiences as research artifacts; and identifying inherent tensions between researchers and their methodological tools. This approach challenges extractive research methods, celebrating research participants’ lived experiences. By prioritizing narrative, cultural context, and participant agency, the research reframes design as a decolonial practice that values pluralistic ways of knowing and understanding.

Patching Up the Landscape: Contributions of Design Practice to Situated Learning Theory. Strategies Applied in Tejiendo la calle

Marina Fernández Ramos — 2025-02-01

This article explores the significant potential of public space as a context for collective interaction, where community art processes can promote situated learning. In these circumstances, the boundaries of conventional educational classrooms and museum white cubes are dissolved, expanding the possibilities for generating knowledge in experiential, cooperative, intergenerational, and transdisciplinary ways. Framed by Lave and Wenger’s situated learning theory, the article aims to contribute to its practical application in the field of design by presenting strategies implemented in the architectural project Tejiendo la calle. These strategies are linked to four essential actions to generate meaningful experiences through creative processes in specific socio-cultural contexts: building community, creating the right circumstances, fostering diversity, and mending the landscape.

Andean Cosmotechnics: Notes for Two Defensive Architectures in the San José Neighborhood in Manizales, Colombia

Julio Suárez Hormazábal — 2025-02-01

This article examines the experience of the ‘Taller Social Latinoamericano’ (Latin American Social Workshop) held in Manizales, Colombia, in 2022, focusing on the construction of the Apu Kumanday Classroom. This circular space, along with the cultivation of protected plant species, stands as an act of resistance against a largescale urban renewal project. The article analyzes two defensive design strategies: the barricade and the shell, both conceived to confront devastation. From a situated practice, it examines both the interplay between progress and violence, as well as the dual role of architecture, as both practice and technique. These reflections are shaped through community-based planting pedagogies, resulting in the creation of a ‘green barricade’ designed to protect and strengthen spaces. Design is framed as a political, aesthetic, and social act, aimed at repairing the socio-spatial fabric fractured by processes of dispossession and eradication.

Intra-action as a Materialist Ontology of the Virtual: From the Analytical Engine to Analog/Digital Intraobjectivity

José Solís Opazo — 2025-02-01

This article provides a theoretical contribution based on Sadie Plant’s critiques of the notion of virtuality as pure immateriality. Plant uses Ada Lovelace’s logic of the ‘Analytical Engine’ as a base, reinterpreting it as a feminine practice associated with the act of weaving, which has been repressed by official cyberculture. From this perspective, the article examines how Remedios Zafra identifies a continuity of this logic in domestic ‘prosumption’ practices, emphasizing their potential to achieve subjective autonomy, albeit subordinated to being captured by the neoliberal digital economy. Finally, Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action is introduced as a materialist ontology of the virtual, complementing Plant’s critiques and addressing the ambiguity of prosumption as discussed by Zafra. This ontology challenges techno-libertarian immaterialism by interpreting ‘digital objects’ as co-productive or intra-objective relations between the analog and the digital.

‘Maraña’ as a Dysphoric Notion for Staying with the Trouble of the Revolt and its Memories

Roberto Fernández — 2025-02-01

This article aims to present the notion of maraña (tangle), a concept useful for addressing the complexities inherent in a world in crisis, where practices, relationships, meanings, and materialities have become so intertwined that traditional design approaches and related disciplines fall short in adequately understanding social phenomena. Through an analysis of the Mauricio Fredes Memorial―raised to preserve the remembrance of a protester who died as a result of the repression during Chile’s 2019 social outburst―we propose an entangled reading of the site, identifying its components, aesthetics, practices, and relationships with its surroundings. The main findings highlight how this Memorial aligns with remembrance practices associated with human rights violations in recent history, and how, through an insurgent co-design logic, the site integrates material and symbolic elements of the revolt into public space.

North Vienna Station: A Paradigmatic Abandonment for a ‘More Livable Future’

Iván Capdevila Castellanos — 2025-02-01

Vienna is one of the first cities to regulate the preservation of existing urban ecosystems, even granting legal status to some places abandoned by humans―where nature has freely emerged―, thereby ensuring coexistence with the inhabiting species. This article aims to clarify how this achievement is motivated by the intertwining of spontaneous, creative, and affirmative experiences in some of these places―such as the North Station―and the Europan Architectural Competition. This contest introduces, first, the theoretical framework that values these experiences and then institutionalizes the lessons learned from them in its new editions. Thus, this text portrays, in three acts, the Europan competition and Vienna as institutions and laboratories―of ideas and sympoietic practices, respectively―that think and design reciprocally.