Commoning Design & Designing Commons

Marisa (https://www.marisajahn.com/) is an artist, filmmaker, and Sundance Fellow who has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia University, and Parsons/The New School, where she is the director of integrated design. Artforum has praised her work as “exemplifying the possibilities of art as social practice.”

Rafi (https://rafisegal.com/) is an architect and associate professor of architecture and urbanism at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His current work focuses on how emerging forms of sharing and collectivity affect the design of buildings and cities.

In this special episode, we reflect upon an online workshop at the Participatory Design Conference 2022, which explored the intersection between relationality, commoning, and designing. The workshop explored temporally, embodied, and geographically distributed ways of relating to others. The episode invites participant voices recorded during the workshop to talk about their affective experience of being together in a collective body, the PD Commoners' body.

In this episode we talk with Dimeji Onafuwa, a Nigerian-American designer, researcher, artist, and educator with experience in transition design. We start with Dimeji’s engagement with the Common Cause Collective, an interdisciplinary group of designers applying transition design methodologies to wicked problems in the Pacific Northwest. Dimeji then explains to us what transition design refers to and then delves into the topic of “recommoning” through Dimeji’s personal journey with working with collectives, and the kind of recommoning tools he has used with them. For him the “re” prefix to commoning refers to the continuous act of reclaiming, allowing designers to work with collectives, in radical interdependence. Dimeji also brings forward the role of the designer in a recommoning context, weaving links between political design, design for social innovation, and the influence that Yoruba culture has had on his quest to get a better understanding of what design could be.

The Common Cause Collective: https://www.commoncause.design/collective

Dimeji’s painting website: https://www.artbydimeji.com/

More on Dimeji’s work: https://www.ecuad.ca/news/2021/dimeji-onafuwa-designs-world-everyone-represented

Here, we talk with Frederick van Amstel - design educator and researcher at UTFPR, Brazil - about critical design pedagogy, the roles of the body and solidarity in relationship to design and commoning. Frederick tells us about his experience with the integration of the Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal's critical pedagogy into design education. In particular, we discuss about how the Pedagogy and the Theater of the Oppressed are crucial and inspiring for developing students' understanding and sensitivity to power imbalances, struggles, and contradictions of contemporary societies, and how in turn they provide prompts to imagine and design path towards liberation. In this context, the (often neglected or oppressed) role of the body can also be a medium to experience and understand oppression and liberation, and it is therefore crucial to explore ways for bringing it back at the center of design discourse and practices. The same can be said about affective relations and solidarity in particular. In fact, Frederick brings us to the underpinning values that emerged out of his and his colleagues work on the Corais platform - a collaborative and cooperative based platform for cultural producers in Brazil.