August 17th, 2021 – 13:00-16:00 @ NORDES2021 (online)
Liesbeth Huybrechts, Oswald Devisch, Mela Zuljevic (UHasselt)
Virginia Tassinari, Annalinda de Rosa (Politecnico Di Milano)
Ezio Manzini (DESIS Network, Politecnico di Milano)
Contributions by Cristiano Storni and Mark Marshall (Limerick University), Anna Seravalli and Ann Light (Malmö University), Panayotis Antoniadis and Seppe De Blust (ETH Zurich), Maurizio Teli (Aalborg University), Chiara Bassetti (UNITN)
Today’s socio-environmental challenges have been made more evident in the Global North by the COVID-19 crisis and the floods in the Low Countries in Europe. It has also become apparent that these challenges can only be addressed by enhancing solidarity across actors operating on various scales and disciplines and cultural, social, political and environmental domains. When solidarity is lacking across these borders, social polarisation is fueled.
The goal of this workshop is to contribute towards an ambition of “re-worlding”, which implies repositioning (participatory) design from an ontological, non anthropocentric perspective, in order for the field to meet socio-environmental challenges by relating actors in different domains, scale levels and disciplines. This ambition is explored by a group of researchers in the field of participatory design from the University of Hasselt, Malmö University, Aalborg University, University of Trento, University of Limerick and ETH Zurich, in collaboration with the Desis Philosophy Talks. More particularly, via the workshop, this group wants to discuss with the design community how designers can rethink and reimagine design capabilities in the light of this ambition, in a participatory and situated way.