Virginia Tassinari — Register for the closing keynote at DCODE Summer School 2022
Re-framing the (cosmo)political agency of designing
Facing the Anthropocene for designing today means not only to recognise where design works as a de-futuring dispositive, but also where designing can prototype different ways of living (well) together, learning to care for one another. For design to step beyond anthropocentrism and become a (reflective) practice of care – working in a way that makes the same possibility of a future possible – we designers first need to be aware of the epistemological paradigm we engage with, and look for/contribute to form conceptual frameworks that deep engage with care. Secondly, we need to explore what designing as a practice of care might concretely mean: in other words, designing as a reflective practice thanks to which careful inter-actions between all actors (humans but also more-than-human ones) can be fostered and further enabled, to collaborative contribute to the construction of a world common to many. In other words: not only designing needs to undergo a serious operation of self-critique and question its fundamental anthropocentrism, but also to seriously (re)address its politics as a cosmopolitics. This keynote will address this (cosmo)political responsibility and open the discussion on designing’s current need to question current epistemological frameworks and engage with new ones by means of its reflective practices.
Virginia Tassinari is a design researcher for Pantopicon (Belgium), an Antwerp-based foresight and design studio, an Adjunct Professor and Researcher at LUCA School of Arts (Belgium), Visiting Lecturer at Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and University of Nimes (France), Visiting Scholar at Parsons, The New School of Design (New York, US) and the co-founder with Ezio Manzini of DESIS Philosophy Talks (https://www.desis-philosophytalks.org), a platform for creating dialogues between designers and social scientists, starting from questions arising from design practice. Her research areas are design and philosophy, with a specific focus on design for social innovation, participatory design, and design activism. She is the co-editor of Designing in Dark Times: An Arendtian Lexicon (Bloomsbury, 2020) and Re-Framing the Politics of Design (Public Space, 2022).
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