Commoning Design & Designing Commons

In this episode of Commoning Design & Designing Commons, Giacomo and Joanna host a conversation with Marisa Morán Jahn and Rafi Segal, authors and editors of "Design and Solidarity - Conversation on collective futures" (Columbia University Press, 2023). Marisa (https://www.marisajahn.com/) is an artist, filmmaker, and Sundance Fellow who has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia University, and Parsons/The New School, where she is the director of integrated design. Artforum has praised her work as “exemplifying the possibilities of art as social practice.” Rafi (https://rafisegal.com/) is an architect and associate professor of architecture and urbanism at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His current work focuses on how emerging forms of sharing and collectivity affect the design of buildings and cities.

In this special episode, we reflect upon an online workshop at the Participatory Design Conference 2022, which explored the intersection between relationality, commoning, and designing. The workshop explored temporally, embodied, and geographically distributed ways of relating to others. The episode invites participant voices recorded during the workshop to talk about their affective experience of being together in a collective body, the PD Commoners' body.

The theme of this 4th episode of the Commoning Design & Designing Commons podcast is urban commons, and together with Anna Seravalli we discuss co-designing and commoning in the context of urban environments. The city space, and especially public space, is a crucial setting for our social life and sustainable living. During the last decade the framework of the “urban commons” has gained popularity as a way to address and tackle contemporary urban challenges varying from urban housing to urban inequality, but also as a matter of responding to the challenge of how to support and maintain public welfare in face of economic cuts, and shrinking economic resources within the public sector. Anna Seravalli works as a senior lecturer and design researcher at The School of Arts and Communication Malmö University. Anna has a background as a product and service designer and holds a PhD in Design and Social Innovation. In her work she engages with citizens, NGO, civil servants and local entrepreneurs in: developing concrete initiatives to foster sustainable transitions within NGOs and public sector organizations.

In this episode we talk with Dimeji Onafuwa, a Nigerian-American designer, researcher, artist, and educator with experience in transition design. We start with Dimeji’s engagement with the Common Cause Collective, an interdisciplinary group of designers applying transition design methodologies to wicked problems in the Pacific Northwest. Dimeji then explains to us what transition design refers to and then delves into the topic of “recommoning” through Dimeji’s personal journey with working with collectives, and the kind of recommoning tools he has used with them. For him the “re” prefix to commoning refers to the continuous act of reclaiming, allowing designers to work with collectives, in radical interdependence. Dimeji also brings forward the role of the designer in a recommoning context, weaving links between political design, design for social innovation, and the influence that Yoruba culture has had on his quest to get a better understanding of what design could be. The Common Cause Collective: https://www.commoncause.design/collective Dimeji’s painting website: https://www.artbydimeji.com/ More on Dimeji’s work: https://www.ecuad.ca/news/2021/dimeji-onafuwa-designs-world-everyone-represented

Do you want to hear and know more about pedagogy, design, oppression, liberation, monstrous bodies, affect, solidarity and commons design? Join us and listen to this episode! Here, we talk with Frederick van Amstel - design educator and researcher at UTFPR, Brazil - about critical design pedagogy, the roles of the body and solidarity in relationship to design and commoning. Frederick tells us about his experience with the integration of the Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal's critical pedagogy into design education. In particular, we discuss about how the Pedagogy and the Theater of the Oppressed are crucial and inspiring for developing students' understanding and sensitivity to power imbalances, struggles, and contradictions of contemporary societies, and how in turn they provide prompts to imagine and design path towards liberation. In this context, the (often neglected or oppressed) role of the body can also be a medium to experience and understand oppression and liberation, and it is therefore crucial to explore ways for bringing it back at the center of design discourse and practices. The same can be said about affective relations and solidarity in particular. In fact, Frederick brings us to the underpinning values that emerged out of his and his colleagues work on the Corais platform - a collaborative and cooperative based platform for cultural producers in Brazil.

In this first brief episode, Joanna Saad-Sulonen, Sanna-Maria Marttila, and Giacomo Poderi chat about the commons, commoning, and designing. Furthermore, they talk about how their research interests have sparked the idea for the production of this podcast, and they anticipate the type of content and invited guests that the forthcoming episodes will engage with. Stay Tuned! :)