Commoning Design and Designing Commons (original) (raw)

Towards commons design in participatory design

PDC '14 Proceedings of the 13th Participatory Design Conference: Short Papers, Industry Cases, Workshop Descriptions, Doctoral Consortium papers, and Keynote abstracts - Volume 2 , 2014

This article probes what the Participatory Design (PD) field can gain from exploring the literature on commons. Through selected examples we point to some connections and commonalities between that literature and the PD field. In doing this, we also bring forward several contributions that this literature can make to PD in order to develop design strategies and approaches to commons design. We believe these can further PD practices and research and help PD to operate with and thrive within increasingly complex design issues and contexts.

Design Commons: Practices, Processes and Crossovers

2022

This book directly links the notion of the commons with different design praxes, and explores their social, cultural, and ecological ramifications. It draws out material conditions in four areas of design interest: social design, commons and culture, ecology and transdisciplinary design. As a collection of positions, the diversity of arguments advances the understanding of the commons as both concepts and modes of thinking, and their material translation when contextualised in the domain of design questions. In other words, it moves abstract social science concepts towards concrete design debates. This text appeals to students, researchers and practitioners working on design in architecture, architecture theory, urbanism, and ecology.

Call for Contributions | Design Commons: Practices, Processes and Crossovers

2019

Design needs to better articulate ways forward, in both its analytic and synthetic conditions of praxis in the context of the commons. Focusing on the question - is design returning to new forms of foundational principles in terms of its material and social practices? – we invite contributions that examine the role of the commons in the design field. In addition, we encourage contributions to reflect on the commons and design in terms of the role of a new design society, theoretical considerations for design models, new emergent materialities in linking the commons with design, contextually driven commons and design processes as well as a population of radical other notions. Proposed abstracts should be 600 words in length, excluding bibliography. Abstracts should focus on how their respective links to either of the three themes, through theoretical positions, design methodologies or practices. Authors are welcome to contact editors with other possible themes before the submission of abstracts. All submissions are to follow the Chicago Manual Style, 16th edition. All papers will be double blind peer reviewed. All abstracts / submissions are to be send to both editors dr.ir. Gerhard Bruyns (gerhard.bruyns@polyu.edu.hk) and dr.ir. Stavros Kousoulas (S.Kousoulas@tudelft.nl) on 29th February 2020.

An Introduction to Design Commons

Springer eBooks, 2022

The reasons for a dedicated edition on "design and commoning" are twofold. First, the recent surge of renewed interest in the social conditions of design remains atheoretical. A deeper theoretical and philosophical foundation will help problematize the link between commoning and design, and in doing so define the operative theories, concepts and frameworks that influence design thinking across a series of design contexts and conditions. And secondly, design has become more ubiquitous, expanding both its domain of influence and conditions of praxis. With this expansion, design touches a variety of contested areas. Designers are continuously challenged by conflicts and edge conditions, having to mitigate between both scales of conflict and the vested interests of individuals. In the global climate of population increase and the prevalent reduction of financial resources the question and theorization of shared capacities will remain part and parcel of future of design thinking. The four thematic clusters contained here exploit the theoretical and philosophical themes related to the large commoning "problematique," providing designers better grounding in the networked context of the twenty-first century. The explicit theorization of design and the commons will explore the implicit relations through each of the collected contributions to show how this philosophical construct can be explicated in the context of network collectives and transdisciplinary approaches that currently inform design practices.

The Politics of Commoning and Designing

This session prompts designers to engage with the political dimensions of working with commons. It brings together practitioners, activists and researchers who explore the tensions and potentialities they encounter when designing for (and from within) commons and 'community economies'. As political theorist Massimo De Angelis (2007) points out, commons can today be thought as the basis on which to build towards futures of social justice, environmental sustainability and a good life for all. However, just as 'community economies' that have at their core the well-being of humans and non-humans alike (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink, 2011), they operate within a world dominated by capital's priorities and are thus not only sites of hope, but also sites of struggle as well as targets of co-optation and enclosure. In organising this panel, our concern was that the political understandings of commons and the politics of their contexts often go unaddressed in design work and discourse. Our desire has been to create a space that foregrounds these dynamics and confronts design with the political meanings and implications of commons.

Emerging spaces in community-based participatory design

Proceedings of the 13th Participatory Design Conference on Research Papers - PDC '14, 2014

This paper engages with issues of universality and locality in the context of community-based participatory design (PD), and focuses on the challenges and opportunities associated with incorporating local views and forms of participation in the design process. The notion of 'designing for participation' is advanced as a quintessential perspective for approaches in which design practices are re-configured from a community-centric standpoint. Building on insights from PD and community development studies, as well as on empirical evidence from two community design studies, we argue that designing for participation appears to be located in a space between the designer's and local views of participation, which are at times both ambiguous and conflicting. To overcome these tensions, we argue for the importance of engaging critically and reflectively with PD in community contexts, and in this process capitalising on disciplinary dialogues that can expand the viewpoint from which PD projects are negotiated and evaluated.

Building Open Design as a Commons

The Critical Makers Reader: (Un)learning Technology, 2019

The concept of Open Design has been embraced by numerous initiatives in design, from furniture to textiles, from product design to social design since its introduction in the ear- ly 2000s.1 Open Design has also brought a revival to openness and sharing in technical domains such as hardware and electronics. Sharing design and production files and instruc- tions has become an almost compulsory ingredient for projects and initiatives that aim to convey a critical dialogue on making, producing, and manufacturing the things that dominate the lives of 21st century city dwellers in the global North. Open design has been proposed as the key ingredient to make and discuss circular products in events such as the 'Open Source Circular Economy Days'2 and the 'POC21 Innovation Camp'.3 Open design has become the preferred modus operandi for social design. Increas- ingly, open design inspires the design and manufacturing sectors and their related institu- tions. Premsela, (at the time) the Netherlands Institute for Design and Fashion,4 was a key partner in publishing the volume Open Design Now.5 In 2018, the Danish Design Centre ran a program for designers and manufacturers to grow their business 'by going open source'.6 Open design, and research about open design, have predominantly been obsessed with the characteristics of open, legal frameworks that would facilitate the openness of design, the control that designers would need to relinquish, and the open access to design resources that everyone would receive.7 However, less attention has been paid to how communities of multiple actors might self-organize in order to create, build, share, and preserve those open design resources. In this article, we trace open design back to its roots and – by building on experiences from a recent open design initiative as well as research into open design practices – we relate the 'how to organize' question of open design to earlier theories of common, shared resources.

Emerging spaces in community-based participatory design: reflections from two case studies.

In Proceedings of the 13th Participatory Design Conference: Research Papers-Volume 1, 2014

Towards the production of design commons: a matter of scale and reconfiguration.

Although new methods of collaborative production might seem to anticipate a communal era in architecture, Harvey argues that commonality strategies that work in small organizations cannot be reproduced in other scales. With this warning as starting point, this article asks for the alternatives of commonality in architecture in its various levels, ranging from object design to urban planning. The commons, intended as an alternative system which covers aspects of production, governance and property, as they are more and more involved with the ways people live, consume and understand themselves, seem to be increasingly intertwined with the disciplines of design and the production of space. The commoners' designing and dwelling, within their social and built environment is, thus, leaning towards the production of designing commons. And although they are already producing design by themselves as a product, this paper proposes the necessity for inventing ways to initiate an effective-in-itself production of the design of commons and of a common design. This is put forward by examining the relation and potential relevance of the notion of the commons to the par excellence discipline of design-to-construct/make/produce, namely architecture, in its variety of scales and tropes.

Commoning Design and Designing Commons (original) (raw)

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