{"id":352,"date":"2017-08-24T11:26:40","date_gmt":"2017-08-24T14:26:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.unisinos.br\/seedinglab\/?p=352"},"modified":"2017-08-24T11:26:40","modified_gmt":"2017-08-24T14:26:40","slug":"call-for-papers-strategic-design-research-journal-special-issue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unisinos.br\/seedinglab\/call-for-papers-strategic-design-research-journal-special-issue\/","title":{"rendered":"Call for Papers | Strategic Design Research Journal Special Issue"},"content":{"rendered":"

Autonom\u00eda | Design strategies for enabling design process<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Vol. 11, n. 3 (Sept-Dec 2018), Strategic Design Research Journal Special Issue<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Guest editors:\u00a0<\/strong>Chiara Del Gaudio, Andrea Botero and Alfredo Gutierrez Borrero<\/p>\n

Information for Contributors <\/strong><\/p>\n

The past decades have seen multiple calls for a reorientation of the design disciplines away from the established functionalist, rationalist, and industrial traditions dominant for most part of their history. New epistemological bases and practices that enable design processes to embrace complexity and to more accurately reflect broad changes in societies are being explored from both critical and mainstream positions. Amongst them we can mention: the understanding of the potentiality of design to lead societal transitions and envision new paradigms by focusing on solutions that are appropriate to local social and environmental conditions while addressing global issues (see e.g.: Irwin et al.<\/em>, 2015); the calls for recognizing and acknowledging people\u2019s empirical knowledge as resources for co-creation (see e.g.: Sanders and Stappers, 2008); propositions for understanding that people are constantly designing and redesigning their lives and that design experts have to use their expertise to support individual and collective projects (see e.g., Manzini, 2015); attempts at empowering non-designers in creative processes to support participation and collaboration (Schuler and Namioka, 1993) and the articulation of new forms of design citizenship and activism (see e.g.: Papanek, 1973; Julier, 2011); the interest in a design practice that acts towards allowing and promoting the expression of dissent to reveal power relations and conflicts, and challenge common practices and discourses (Disalvo, 2010); and the experimentation of new forms of observing, moving, describing and imagining the local environment in a relationship of constant engagement with local inhabitants, based on imagining a joint field between design and anthropological practices (see e.g.: Anastassakis, 2013). Even if not a comprehensive list of current trends, those listed are equally important, components of the growing call for a significant reorientation of design.<\/p>\n

Particular recent developments foster a deeper reflection on whether design, and other modernist practices, can actually contribute to the development of those communal human-non human assemblages \u00a0that are necessary for a transition towards more sustainable and plural ways of being. As the anthropologist Arturo Escobar (2016) stresses, this seems to be quite a challenge for design, even for the above mentioned trends. \u00a0In addressing this question, Escobar suggests that the calls for autonomy emerging from mobilized grassroots communities in Latin America -amongst others – can act as interesting signposts for design, and that new forms of design practice that acknowledge and work with-in an autonomy framework can be key contributors to this reimagining of our collective futures (Escobar, 2012; Escobar, 2016, 2017)**. In his analysis, there are promising examples of collectives fostering and developing concrete ways of \u201cchanging tradition traditionally\u201d, and processes that foster the idea of \u201cchanging the ways we change\u201d (Escobar, 2016, p.140), which Escobar summarizes under the idea of autonom\u00eda.<\/p>\n

Drawing from contemporary understandings of autopoiesis and autonomy, autonom\u00eda<\/em> can be understood as a \u201ccultural, ecological and political process that involves autonomous forms of existence and decision making\u201d (Escobar, 2016, p. 141). From the perspective of design and designing, this means supporting conditions for collectives to be able to effect change and to change according to their traditions allowing \u201cevery community [to] practice the design of itself\u201d (Escobar, 2016, p. 16). A framework of autonom\u00eda<\/em> seems to challenge some (current) widespread design practices for community empowerment, where unspecified interest in doing good through collaboration or by fostering a re-socialization of design are not sufficient. Instead, working towards enabling and fostering autonom\u00eda<\/em>, brings radical changes in design perspective: it means to incorporate into design practices the relational dimension of life, which also imply more communal and relational modes of knowing, being and doing. \u00a0This might also involve working with other types of designs, including \u201cdesigns from the South\u201d (see e.g.: Gutierrez Borrero, 2015; Tunstall, 2016) and a decolonizing of design (Tlostanova, 2017<\/span><\/p>\n

Building on the idea of autonom\u00eda<\/em>, we ask ourselves: What is the relation between autonom\u00eda, design practices and the political activation of relational and communal logics and ways of being, in current research and design practice? Which existing design practices and approaches could be seen as contributing to communal forms of autonom\u00eda? If so, how do they do it, what tactics and strategies they mobilize? (see e.g.: Marttila and Botero 2016; Mitra\u0161inovi\u0107, 2016). Given that the boundaries between \u201cenabling designing\u201d, \u201cdesigning with\u201d and \u201cdesigning for\u201d are difficult to set and are constantly changing, are designers and the collectives they work with aware of autonom\u00eda<\/em>? Should they be? Is autonom\u00eda<\/em> a good guiding principle for design practice?<\/p>\n

Design’s role in facilitating, leading, impeding, imposing, and persuading through design ideas has implications for the ways we live and the worlds we create. This is particularly important if one considers that designs most established practices stem from the dualist ontology associated with patriarchal capitalist modernity. \u00a0The framework of autonom\u00eda envisions a design praxis that actively deals with the complexity of the design process itself and its implications in world-making processes. It does so particularly by adopting a relational (e.g., nondualist or post-dualist) ontological design perspective. In this special issue, we seek original contributions \u2013 conceptual and theoretical analysis as well as case studies or empirical findings \u2013 that critically engage with one (or more) of the questions raised here (and above):<\/p>\n