Class Design Communities

The course Design for Communities investigates design as a discipline capable of guiding, planning, and integrating relationships within sustainable and equitable socio-cultural spaces, attentive to the future of multiple communities. It explores how marginalized groups can break systemic inequalities, promote collective emancipation, and ensure ecological sustainability. It provides students with an understanding of the strategic potential of Communication Design in shaping the present and future of communities, valuing approaches grounded in sustainability and environmental awareness. Students develop planning and communication skills that generate change in the ways we interact, imagine, and build urban spaces, transform landscapes, and foster cooperation. The course also examines the structures of artificial and natural communities, human and non-human, within a globalized world and across networks interconnected by local and global cultural processes.

Not applicable

— Democracy, local and global histories — Human and non-human habitats, ecology, and systems thinking — Collaborative, participatory, and interaction methods — Fieldwork and public sessions — Maintenance, care, and sustainable implementation

Introduction of working with/for communities in a communication design course, using collaborative practices and methods as an essential part of design practice. Adoption of participatory methods as ways of addressing contemporary design practice. In this sense, interdisciplinarity enables the absorption of methodologies from various disciplines that expand and complement those normally used within the design field.

Boer, R. (2023) Smooth City: Against Urban Perfection, Towards Collective Alternatives. Amsterdam: Valiz. Brown, Adrienne Maree. (2017) Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. Chico: AK Press, 2017. Gibson-Graham, J.K., and Ethan Miller. ‘Economy as Ecological Livelihood’. In “Manifesto for Living in the Anthropocene”, edited by Katherine Gib-son, Deborah Bird Rose, and Ruth Fincher, 7–16. New York: Punctum Books, 2015. Haraway, Donna. Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin. En-vironmental Humanities, vol. 6, 2015.