design studio IV (strategic design) - autoethnography
hey there :-) here is my intro-perspective journal of strategic design.
*note for my professors: pls don’t fail me, k thx, enjoyyyyyyyyy*
4/9
* Vázquez is pushing back against the modern/colonial idea of a universal, detached self (the “view from nowhere”) and calling for a decolonial understanding of identity. To be a positioned self means:
- recognizing your specific place in power relations
- respecting the multiplicity of worlds and histories.
- and accepting responsibility for how you are implicated in ongoing structures of inequality.
* VUCA World
designing considering the VUCA terms: Volatility, Uncertainty, Complex, and Ambiguity
* Strategic Design is about creating your own model or framework.
* Desire in Design
importance of directing energy and effort towards movements that give rise to form and meaning, coexist within the same plane rather than apart.
11/9
* complex systems, understanding that complex systems are a variety of connections and multilayered. these systems entail of non linear relationships and unpredictable results.
* the importance of understanding the consequences of designing.
* complicated versus complex systems
each system to an extent relies on the other. for example a pilot flying a plane is a complicated system, it requieres time and effort but it can be done, on the other hand a complex system in this scenario would be the conditions the pilot is flying in, unpredictable and incalculable.
*separate pieces in order to bring back together: “the whole is more than the sum of its parts.” Aristotle
*emotions can cloud reality and as a result not allowing you to see the patterns in systems.
4/9
*Barcelona Super Blocks*
redesigning streets to favor pedestrians over automobiles
*Forest Fires Madrid Outskirts*
design decisions can lead to the problem, importance in analyzing all possible outcomes of design, negative or positive.
*Liz Sanders Strategic Design Diagram*
tools
11/9
*Donella Meadows, Dancing with Systems*
how you cannot control or design systems but you can dance with them to understand them.
PROJECT ADVANCEMENTS
4/9
group formation (Charles Martel, Isabel Valero, Pao Gutierrez)
sdg selection (sdg 9- industry, innovation, and infrastructure)
9/9
initial stages of unpacking and addressing our SDG 9 (industry, innovation, + infrastructure) from the root of the problem.
we began by analyzing certain realms of this SDG. one of those being hydro energy and analyzing the impact of AI data centers to our communities. we analyzed the possibility of creating a hydro clean data center around madrid. after research and better understandings we left this route and began the pursue of a new route
11/9
mapping why we care about this sdg and understanding the stakeholders within it. wanting to promote degrowth and controlled city growth, we began investigating and mapping our interests and thoughts.
14/9
* in ontology design it is important to address what kind of world we are designing from and for who?
* shifting narratives
changing the narrative of human domination to ecological participation when considering life centered design.
* Arturo Escobar: rejected one size fits all solutions, he believed in designing with, rather than for, communities and systems.
Escobar rejects modernist principles of functionality, profit, and unilinear definitions, believes that these have led to our current overproduction and consumption.
strongly believed in the degrowth of modernism: he questions excess of rationalism, commodification, and ecological domination. reflects the coupling of progress with exponential growth. a life centered design advocate, believes that having an only exclusive focus on the human user ultimately blinds us from broader, ecological, and ethical concerns. stated how the user is not just the consumer but the whole ecosystem.
*Escobar and the Pluriverse*
the pluriverse is the concept of a world where many worlds fit. Escobar believed in unlearning 3 main principles of design in order to design adequately and for a pluriverse.
1. unlearning the idea of designers as experts
- designers must let go of control, and learn to embrace uncertainty
- expertise becomes shared and distributed, almost invisible
2. unlearning the idea that problems are universal
- challenges the concept that every challenge must be framed as a “problem” in order to be fixed.
3. unlearning that all knowledge is designable
- not everything can or should be a framework.
- lives in stories, rituals, landscapes, or symbols cannot be captured or translated into design terms, doing so can flatten context or harm the information shared
- not everything needs to be mapped, visualized, or made actionable
- SOME INSIGHTS ARE MEANT TO INFORM BEING, NOT DOING, RESPECT OPACITY.
14/9
*Arturo Escobar*
author of designs for the pluriverse
*Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and Making of Worlds. *
* “The notion of one world world signals the predominant idea in the west that we all live within a single world, made up of one, underlying reality and many cultures. This imperialistic notion supposes the west’s ability to arrogate for itself the right to be the world.” - arturo escobar