Situated Design Practices¶
Syllabus: Students will explore four distinct situated design practices. The course offers two complementary levels of exploration: one focused on geographical contexts and the other driven by community engagement. While these approaches can be examined separately, their materiality and meaning often intersect. The course invites students to discover, visit, and contextualize various metropolitan areas of Barcelona. Through this journey, we will delve into their unique identities, historical narratives, and contemporary realities. Students will engage with local communities involved in diverse professional and personal practices. We will also foster connections with artists, lawyers, journalists, and niche internet personalities to better understand how communities emerge or are shaped—whether recognized or hidden, institutionalized or marginalized, celebrated or stigmatized.
Overview:¶
Day 1 - Barcelona Supercomputing Center¶
There is a quantum computer in a chapel. The guide doesn’t know how much energy it uses.¶
Day 2 - Cal Negre¶
Building ocarinas in El Prat. Paella tastes better with the neighbor’s vegetables.¶
Day 3 - Ozzline Mercedes¶
The bed is an extension of the internet. Stripper residencies in New York.¶
Day 4 - Hibai Arbide¶
The autonomy of migration. Migration routes are political infrastructures. AI will crash your protest.¶
Reflections¶
This week was a glimpse into an eclectic collection of practices. On the surface it is hard to draw a clear line between the four days.
There are two major takeaways for me:
- Material Location
- Community
(1) Stay connected to the materiality of your location.
The supercomputer reaches the most vast depths of the internet, but it’s housed inside a former chapel. If that doesn’t make a statement, I don’t know what else can.
It’s one thing to make ceramics, it’s another to make ceramics with clay harvested from your backyard, and then fired in the whole you dug out the clay from.
(2) Know the community you’re designing for (or against). Don’t underestimate the affects.
Well curated social media profiles and substacks can attract the right clientele, and boost reputation in your professional circle. It can also trap you in your avatar and encourage others to join.
Designing AI (Centaur and Hyperion) to keep borders secure without a doubt will reinforce ideas of in-group and out-group. Just wait until it prevents you from throwing your party because the HOA has decided no noise pollution after 11pm.
Reflections Continued…¶
I wrote the above reflections the week of the course. I was pretty overwhelmed with information, since that week I was also in classes from 5pm-9:30pm at Elisava.
After giving it some space and letting the experience sit, there was another reflection that bubbled to the surface:
(3): Every choice you make will create and shape the community around you.
When Maria and Tom choose to harvest clay from their immediate surroundings they are eliminating the chance to build community at a ceramic studio. But at the same time, they are bringing in other people - neighbors, strangers, students - into their community. In that same vein, when Ozzline decided to transition from stripping to dominatrix work, she changed the group of people around her. As she found more time to write online, her community grew in a digital vector, and less in the club context. As Hibai described, when the refugees attempting to cross into Greece get pushed back and have to find another way in, they create strong, albiet temporary groups to come up with their next attempt strategy.
Last term, Thomas Thwaites said something that stuck with me: Everything you make will harm something, it’s up to you to decide who.
My version of that from this class would be something along the lines of:
Everything you make will create community, and push another away. It’s up to you to decide whom.