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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?

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.

Inside/Outside: Working our way out of the damaged now (Design as dialectics) is a discourse manifested as an exhibition of experimental design work at the San Francisco State University Design Gallery from February 16 to March 30 with a discussion in the gallery on March 1 from 4-6pm. The exhibition is curated by Joshua Singer and Virginia Tassinari and is in collaboration with DESIS Philosophy Talk @Studio Time and LUCA Arts DESIS Lab.

The DESIS Philosophy Talks @Studio Time is new initiative resulting from the collaboration between DESIS Network/DESIS Philosophy Talks and Z33 Research/Studio Time. This research project is a new travelling series of reflections and actions that will be held in different places around the world, and involve scholars from a wide range of disciplines. The aim […]