Ecehan

I've also done a total room makeover. I needed a new bed and have changed all the wallpapers. There are 4 neutral white walls and one feauture wall with a different kind of wallpaper which you see in front of you when walking in. It took me hundreds of google searches five weeks to decide on the right wallpaper, because once it's on there, it will stay there for a couple of years. Because I'm an introvert I'm spending a great amount of time in this space. The makeover made me think about who I am and what I stand for from a visual perspective, especially about what kind of environment would benefit my well being the most.

2: The act of reading

Arturo Escobar is an anthropologist who has done research in the fields of social change, political ecology and the anthropology of development. He teaches the idea of an ontological approach to design, meaning; anything we design has an impact on our collective state of being. In designing tools, we are designing ways of life.

As far as I understand, the text promotes the idea of taking the design of things out of the traditional top-down hierarchical design and production systems and spreading it out across society and broader networks. Doing that would be benefitial to social change, as the users of the design (whatever the product may be) are more involved in the design and the production process. The text does not define what is exactly meant by "design", so I assume it's about both product design as well as the (more abstract) design of the ways in which our societies operate.

"the more a system is scattered and networked, the larger and more connected is its interface with society and the more the social side of innovation has to be considered” (Manzini 2015, 17). I thought this quote on page 160 was interesting because in a way it is about bringing people closer together by breaking down top-down hierarchies and giving the system of innovation back to society itself. By doing that, people have to put extra consideration into the social side of the innovation or design.

"New design approaches are to be based on a positioning that is both critical of the current state of things and constructive, in terms of actively contributing to broad cultural change." I found this quote also interesting because I partially agree and partially disagree. I agree because I think it's a positive thing when design can contribute to the improvement of certain societal problems which need solutions or improvement. However, I don't think it's necessary to be critical all the time on the current state of things. I believe that there are a lot of products we purchase and use with a certain limit, after which another design does not necessarily improve the functionality or the user's well being.

To connect the text to my own practice, I asked the following question;

Could co-design processes be a tool to create social change
in the field of architectural design?

While thinking of an example, I remembered the architectural philosophy and the work of architect Alejandro Aravena. I had watched a Ted-talk by him a couple of weeks ago in which he explained that the biggest driver behind his designs is the involvement of the community into the design process. His project Quinta Monroy housing in Chile is an example of this. Because the budget was very limited and there were a lot of constraints, the design studio got the families themselves involved into the design process. The architects build half of the houses instead of a complete house and provided an expandable frame. Then the families took over and slowly finished the other half of their house by themselves. Given the 10.000 dollar budget they had to both buy the land and cover all the construction costs, I think it's a very good example of problem solving and collaboration.

My notes on Arturo Escobar: Designs for the pluriverse

For this assignment I have interviewed my best friend. She lives in Belgium and I haven't been able to visit her for months.

I grouped with Maya for the resit period. After all these months of isolation it was refreshing to work together again.
Since the lockdown was basically over for her, while I was already back in Armenia in a full quarantine, we couldn’t relate the COVID isolation of April anymore. First, we had the idea of doing a projection mapping and sharing thoughts of people on buildings, so basically having the contrast of small bits of personal thoughts on big, uncomfortable spaces. This took us to a conversation about our current situations, and we realized that, in a way, we have similarities in our background: some current political heat, the socialist past, a lot of abandoned spaces.
We thought it’s more relevant and more open (educational, why not) to combine our current situations, common historical past and connect our project to it.

Also, we noticed how the quarantine detached people from the world, as everyone was literally interacting with their own close, small environment (room, laptop screen), so we wanted to create a space where people could just share simple images from their lives and see, learn what life is like in other parts of the world.

We thought of making collages with all these scenes/buildings and distribute it as posters around with short texts about human survival/class struggle/social conditions, however, not in a very sophisticated way.
For collecting images and sharing with people, we thought opening an Instagram and taking people’s submissions of places they live in, or just images from their city that mean something to them. This could be an Instagram page for instance. That would also allow to create a network and share personal images of scenery, to make these collective images (collages) and talk about really simple, human actions and encourage humans to share their visual environments with each other and think about questions, especially after/during a pandemic that has made us question a lot.

Our audience is every citizen, every person who evern walks around or just wonders how people further than they are living.