Design Studio
Faculty
Tomas Diez
Oscar Tomico
Mariana Quintero
Syllabus and Learning Objectives
MDEF Research, Design and Development studios aim to take research areas of interest and initial project ideas into an advanced concretion point, and execution plan. The studio structure in three terms could be understood as follows:
TERM 1 Research: Understanding what it means to design for emergent futures. Analyzing the past and finding weak signals. References, state of the art. Identifying areas of interest. Experimenting from the first-person perspective.
TERM 2 Design: Forming the present through interventions in the real world. Building the foundations of your design space, forming strategic partnerships. Applying knowledge into practice through iterative prototyping. Testing ideas and prototypes in the real world.
TERM 3 Development: Refining interventions and identifying desirable futures. Establishing roadmaps for the construction of emergent narratives.. Communicating and disseminating your project through speculative design.
The third term Design Studio aims to refine the work developed by students during the first and second term of the Master program (research and design). After identifying areas of interest from weak signals in the first term, and creating their design space and interventions, students will be encouraged to take a further step into their projects, focusing on designing an improved intervention in the real world (digital or physical). Special efforts will be geared towards the development of projects in the context of the current global pandemic, and how such interventions take place in new contexts (domestic, digital, new locations), while contributing to the previous work in tems one and two, and continue building the project’s vision for desirable futures..
The Design Studio time will be dedicated to supporting the students to adapt their work in the current special global context, develop their final design intervention in new spaces, and communicate their project to build new narratives, taking into account the current “new normal”. During the studio, studio leaders will bring invited guests to introduce topics of interest to the process and to participate in tutorials during the desk crits.
Total Duration
Weekly studio days will be every Tuesday from 14:30hrs to 17:30hrs.
Structure and Phases
- __Apr 16 - Kick off - My new me
Activities: Reflect on how the new normal is shaping you personally. Explore and document a day in your life with notes, photos, videos, self-interviews…
Deliverable: One post with some visuals (photo, video, graphics, moodboard,…). A short reflection in a 2-3 minute video, following the “youtuber” model.. - __Apr 21 - Mapping my domestic experimental laboratory
Activities: Accept and reflect on how the new normal is shaping you as a professional. Rethinking your new hyper-local and hyper-connected design space.
Goals: Being resilient and resourceful as a professional.
Deliverable: One post with a new design space including what infrastructure, people, things and materials became available either physical or virtual in this new normal. - __Apr 28 - Experimenting with my project in emergent contexts
Activities: Looking for new meaningful actions, being resilient and resourceful.
Goals: Piloting a new intervention with yourself or close connections.
Deliverable: one post documenting your design actions with new normal design space and resources. Plan for your design intervention (after piloting yourself). - __May 5 - Collaborating with others for my project in new spaces
Activities: Relating 1st, 2nd and 3rd person perspectives in a hyper-local and hyper-connected context.
Goals: Create a new intervention in this new normal.
Deliverable: one post with documenting your design intervention. A distributed, online collective design action. - __May 12 - Creating your own biography and constituency
Activities: From a post-human design perspective explore your evolution (you and your context) from before and during the master.
Goals: Understand who you are and what you are capable of.
Deliverable: one post with visualizing own biography and constituency. Include a short reflection for each one. - __May 19 - Reflecting about new weak signals in your future scenario
Activities: Any transformation needs to occur now already taking into account the future new normal scenario you want to achieve not the given one.
Goals: Reflection on two previous experiments and analyze the opportunities for reframing the future new normal that you want to achieve.
Deliverable: one post with new weak signals describing how the present opportunities for your project you haven’t explored before shape your future new normal. scenario - __May 26 - Emerging Narratives
Activities: Outlining a clear vision for your project. Defining clear intentions and developing a clear identity.
Goals: Distilling the mission and vision of your project.
Deliverable: A communication strategy for your project. - __June 2 - Looking forward
Activities: From Hyper-Local to Hyper-Global - Outlining strategies to reach interconnected global scales. Goals: Reflection on the scalability of the project to other contexts.
Deliverable: A professional development plan for after this year of the master. - __June 9 - Closing the Loop
Activities: Draft set up for the “exhibition/book/event”.
Goals: Prepare and define the Design Dialogues final presentation.
Output
Deliverables:
Document (2-4 pages per chapter, 7 chapters)
Set of 5 photos to communicate the project (high / print quality)
Video (2-3 mins max)
Prototype / Platform / etc.
Presentation
Grading Method
Academic level of the final document (framing of the opportunity, state of the art, literature review, …) (20%)
Level of clarity and detail of the communication material (photos, video, exhibition set-up, book) (20%)
Quality and resourcefulness of the designed prototype/platform/ etc (20%)
Social value of the interventions based on the analysis of the results (20%)
Depth in the personal reflection and main learning points (10%)
Motivation level, proactive behaviors & attendance (10%)
Bibliography
Speculative Everything - Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby
Adversarial Design - Carl DiSalvo
Massive Change - Bruce Mau, Jennifer Leonard and Institute without Boundaries
Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change - Victor Papanek
Liquid Modernity - Zygmunt Bauman
Who Owns the Future? - Jason Lanier
This Changes Everything - Naomi Klein
To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism - Evgeny Morozov
Democratizing Innovation - Eric Von Hippel
Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things - Michael Braungart, William McDonough
Macrowikinomics: New Solutions for a Connected Planet - Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams
The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World - Jeremy Rifkin
The Death and Life of Great American Cities - Jane Jacobs
The Third Plate - Dan Barber
Free Innovation - Eric Von Hippel
Limits to Growths - Donella H. Meadows
The Human Face of Big Data - Rick Smolan
TOMAS DIEZ
Email Address
Personal Website
Twitter Account
@tomasdiez
Facebook Profile
tomasdiez77
Professional BIO
Tomas Diez is a Venezuelan Urbanist specialized in digital fabrication and its implications on the future cities and society. He is the co-founder of Fab Lab Barcelona, leads the Fab City Research Laboratory, and is a founding partner of the Fab City Global Initiative. He is the director of the Master in Design for Emergent Futures at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) in Barcelona, where he is faculty in urban design and digital fabrication. Tomas is co-founder of other initiatives such as Smart Citizen (open source tools for citizen engagement), Fab City (locally productive, globally connected cities), Fablabs.io (the listing of fab labs in the world), and StudioP52 (art and design space in Barcelona).
OSCAR TOMICO
Email Address
Personal Website
Twitter Account
@otomico
Professional BIO
Oscar Tomico holds an MSc degree in Industrial Engineering from Polytechnic University of Catalonia (Spain) and a PhD from the same institution, awarded in 2007 with Cum Laude. During his research into Innovation Processes in Product Design, he investigated subjective experience-gathering techniques based on constructivist psychology. After finishing his PhD he worked as a consultant for Telefonica R&D (Barcelona). Tomico joined Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) in 2007 as Assistant Professor. He has been a guest researcher and lecturer at AUT Creative technologies (New Zealand), at TaiwanTech (Taiwan), Swedish School of Textiles (Sweden), Institute of Advanced Architecture (Spain), University of Tsukuba, Aalto (Finland) to name a few. During his sabbatical in 2015 he worked as a consultant for the functional textiles department at EURECAT (Spain). He recently (2017) became the head of the Industrial Design Bachelor’s degree program at ELISAVA University School of Design and Engineering of Barcelona.
MARIANA QUINTERO
Email Address
Personal Website
https://marianaquintero.io
Professional BIO
Multimedia developer, interaction designer & researcher, Mariana Quintero works and develops her practice at the intersection where digital fabrication technologies, digital literacy and information and computation ethics & aesthetics meet, contributing to projects that investigate the rise of the third digital revolution and how digital information and technologies translate, represent and mediate knowledge about the world. For the last three years she has been based in Barcelona contributing to research projects at IAAC | Fab Lab Barcelona and developing digital literacy curricula.