Author: Virginia Tassinari

Politecnico di Milano, February 21stPolifactory, 14:30-17:30 The DESIS Philosophy Talk “#7.1 “Designing as Politics (of nature)” is the first of a new series of talks dedicated on the topic of post-anthropocentric design. This first conversation, that will be prompted by the Politecnico di Milano PhD programme in Design, will take place on February 21st, 2019 […]

This seminar is intended for both design researchers/practitioners as well as civil servants and public administrators who are working with designers to stimulate participatory active citizenship in urban contexts. We will discuss if and how our projects – in which we aim to enable and strengthen active citizenship – could help to enrich the democratic discourse.

If we agree that like Benjamin we are living today in what he refers to as “the time of remains”, lacking trust in our future, perhaps his thoughts and ideas can help us shape a discourse to act as designers and thinkers from within this crisis. How can design help to give voice to the potentialities that lie in the remains of destruction? Can designers push forward new potentialities in a time of crisis? How? How can we ‘learn’ to listen and find these hidden stories? And how can we do this beyond linear thinking, avoiding the future to be a continuation of the failures and mistakes of the past?

This DESIS Philosophy Talk belongs to a series of travelling talks (www.desis-philosophytalks.org) developed in collaboration with Z33 Research STUDIOTIME, which started in New York, continued in San Francisco and Milan, and will carry on in October at Istanbul Design Week. This talk brings the experience developed within a discussion from last year, which focused particularly […]

In the conversation we will explore how the philosophy of Walter Benjamin can help speculative design and design fictions to look at the future outside of a linear idea of time. In particular, we will discuss how his idea of collection can contribute to this discussion and possibly support critical reflection in speculative design and design fiction, and perhaps power new reflective practices inspired by Benjamin’s insights.

In the face of a democracy in crisis, in all its forms, and convinced that democracy’s core principles are more valid today than ever, we propose a discussion around the following question: Can the experiences of participatory design in general, and the ones of design for social innovation in particular, help to update and upgrade the ideas and practices of democracy (and, specifically, those of participative democracy)? In order to start this discussion a scenario is proposed, i.e. a scenario of a collaborative, design-based democracy.