Abstract

Today’s social, political, and environmental emergencies require specific efforts in terms of thinking/acting in designing practices to produce new kinds of knowledge. The Summer School wants to explore the emerging systemic transition which demands a radical transformation of knowledge models. The uncertainty that characterizes times of crisis forces us to question the strategies, tools, and instruments at our disposal to understand the current context and change it through design. With the pandemic striking our usual way to think the future, this may be the opportunity to better understand the huge potential of future literacies as a methodological tool to convey concepts and information in rethinking knowledge boundaries. Located at the intersection of the material, the cultural, the epistemic, the ontological, the technological, the philosophical, the political, design contains the seeds of the capacity for becoming an agent of radical transformation and generative production. It can do that on the condition that it becomes also a medium of critical inquiry, unleashing its capacity to interrogate the present and build new worlds, beyond the overwhelming deterministic visions pushed by contemporary socio-technical and socio-economic systems. The School will be a theoretical and pragmatic occasion to challenge knowledge systems, based on deterministic blueprints and models, and to reimagine and re-make design as a mode of inquiry and as a practice to interrogate the present. It might lead to an inter-, trans-, post-disciplinary exploration exploring the role, agency, and responsibility of design in showing unexpected possible directions of change. It might be a meta-knowledge inquiry about Research through Design within the perspective of decolonizing knowledge, unfolding the opportunities of knowing, and world-building. It might be an investigation of how speculative and critical approaches can be deployed to rethink futures in light of theories and the practices coming from other disciplines.