Affective Bodies: Intimate Design Practices to Reinvent the Everyday (original) (raw)
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The care of public spaces in urban environments has always been an indicator of a nation's welfare, impacting greatly on people's behaviours. In these terms, design of public spaces performs a political action, related to common life, because it holds people's ideals. Designers need to tell the story of how design can play a significant role in creating social change. This paper reports on the activities of an alliance of academics, designers, architects, artists and activists in the development of a public campaign to speculate on how a city might act on its present and forecast its future: Superelevata Foot[prints]. It focuses on the topic of recycling and re-use of abandoned spaces, by testing resources and chances as prerequisites of an open working process through specific tools and design practices. Is it possible to delineate a method and an innovation process by reading again these new spontaneous attitudes defined by the urgency to act? Is it possible to improve the political dimension of design action, conceiving the project as performance, as experienced in the '60 by radical groups? If design comes out from the interaction between a practice, which requests to change the state of the things, and a culture, which makes sense of this change, how do the public design activities produce culture and behavioural change? How can this culture orientate and offer common horizons to the multiplicity of practices that take place in design activities? Keywords: recycle , behavioural change, urban narrative, bottom up practices, abandoned spaces, design activism EVERYDAY EMERGENCIES The quality of our life is closely related to that of our living spaces. Inhabiting means to exist. Living is not only about the relationship with objects and spaces, but also with the social dimension. Through objects and spaces are incidental to the ideas of staying and acting. (Fiorani, 2012) The city is the space in which the characters of living are manifested more clearly, not only in a physical way, but also in a social one. The unstable urban context offers itself as an experimental field for design. It has ceased being a mere functional process meant for a restricted market of sophisticated street furniture to become one of the fundamental activities for the contemporary city life. The rationalist idea of designing as the result of the dichotomy between form and function by identifying optimal and final products, Author Affiliation email
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