Next call A30 Designing for the real world

To the insidious and recurrent question of excluding latitude about what it is to project as opposed to design, is added the tragicomic vacillation about what reality might be, or better, among the possible ones, the one that will be the one that will be the one to be decanted for a survey, which is not a determining objective.

Now that the economic crises of 2008 and the pandemic crisis of 2020 have passed - as routes, but also as lacerating blows - and we suspect that they are the same, we need to take a stance that is, at the same time, an action, renewing the causes that unfortunately added up from the disciplines that before these crises traditionally had this social attribution.

Renewing means not only rethinking what architecture is today, but also what world it is, what reality it reveals. If we admit design as a category of categories, put into the dimension "World", it entails considering "everyday life, but it goes on to infrastructures, cities, inhabited space, medical technologies, food, institutions, landscapes, the virtual and, ultimately, experience" if we follow the reflection that Arturo Escobar proposed in "Autonomy and Design, the realisation of the communal" in 2016.

In the constitution of any statute of renewal, a state of the question appears, in the light of some antecedents in order to, on the basis of this, bet on the radicality of what, until then, was not feasible. The dislodging of the Modern base, which permeates everything with its exact inadequacy, would require, in such a renewal, an absorption wipe that clears the consequences in order to make visible what we have as a common foundation.

Some, using guarantors who have limited degrees of freedom, appeal to fraternity and forgiveness for cohesion. Others, autistic, maintain that the crisis is a transition and that we will get out of it sooner or later. There are those who take advantage of the news of the last few days, with the wretched consequence of its acceleration.

Real worlds, distant yet interacting, whose final clause of the constitution of the feasible leaves the door open to action generated by an ontological key of design where there are no specialists but rather responsibilities disseminated to achieve autonomy and formulate life-forms.