Co-Design for Resilience: A South-North feedback for a
world in transition
The transition to more sustainable societies carries challenges
that require collaborative efforts. At the same time, there are
urgent crises that need timely and creative responses to prompt the
resilience of social-environmental systems. Co-design can be a way
to enhance processes of collaborative and creative change within
communities facing that type of struggle. However, its
methodologies and tools come from a very specific context, which
often diminishes their potential when applied to issues that occur
outside circumstances similar to those where the co-design tools
were originated.
In order to be able to use co-design as a means to find other
ways of existing and relating to the world, ones that are more fair
and balanced for instance, it would be necessary to learn from
different ways of worlding (Escobar, 2015). Consequently, there is
a need of other ontologies in design to create alternative futures.
To find those ontologies, design could learn from different ways of
understanding and making the world that already exist - worldviews
that most of the times have been displaced by a dominant
vision.
Through my research, I aim to explore the possibilities of
co-design through an exchange of social forms and relationships
with the human and non-human environment. My starting point is
inspired by the approaches of degrowth (D'Alisa, et al., 2015) and
the epistemologies of the south (Sousa, 2011). Both visions have an
emancipatory purpose to transcend current hegemonic social
interactions and may work as a basis in the search for alternative
and more sustainable ways of understanding, making and living the
world, other ways of designing.
My interest is to find collaborative systems that are more
appropriate to the historical moment of our critical present, with
objectives other than those of the industry and taking into account
other views of civilizational models. I seek to face co-design
tools and methodologies to realities different from those of their
origin and learn from an ecology of knowledges (Sousa, 2016) to
feed the discussions around co-design for social transformation.
This exchange is needed to imagine post-capitalist futures with a
wider variety of references and sharing the benefits of what has
been done through collaborative processes in both the global South
and North.
Supervisor: Johan Redström & Brendon
Clark
Areas of interest: Co-Design, Design for
Sustainability, Diseño de los Sures / Diseños Otros, Degrowth,
Epistemologies of the South, Emancipatory Processes, Care,
Conviviality, Trust
For
contact details to Xaviera Sánchez de la Barquera Estrada, click
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