Our  project ( Eliza Chojnacka, Markel Cormenzana, Sabrina Haas, Elena Hess-Rheingans, James Hillman, Yang Li and  me) from Speculative Education Research  has been chosen for the SpeculativeEdu exhibition at BIO 26 (https://bio.si/en/) in Ljubljana!  For the Biennial's organizers our creation process correlates with this year  theme:  "Common Knowledge". This year’s Biennial of Design tackled the information crisis. "BIO 26 presents six winning projects selected through the Designathon in which groups of designers and non-designers took on the challenges pressing on the institutions of knowledge production and knowledge transmission. "

I had the pleasure to facilitate this workshop where children had the opportunity to know about what anthropology is and how can we use anthropological observation to discover unexpected thins about our own way of life. The activity involved in create an “auto-ethnography”, a document that shows aspects of their everyday lives that pass unnoticed or too familiar to be highlighted. The participant’s product was put in a time capsule to be closed for 60 years. The participants, children only, will be the faithful guardians of our Time Capsule 

This workshop was conceived influenced by the work of Steve McQueen and the way he conditions our gaze with his interweaving of audio-visual material in the work Once Upon a Time.  It is the result of his own look at the Voyager Golden Record– an attempt to summarize humanity and our planet for the purpose of intergalactic communication. This workshop aimed to continue another project, also a time capsule, launched at the time of CAPC's 60th anniversary celebration. The CAPC Time Capsule will be composed of a “container space” where objects will be placed which were chosen by various individuals and artists associated with the history of the Círculo de Artes Plásticas de Coimbra. Via group activities, we foster reflection, from which concepts and images that characterise and represent today’s society may emerge. It is from this reflection that we can imagine desirable futures as active citizens. The participants, children only, will be the faithful guardians of our Time Capsule, which will be closed for 60 years. 

I participated in the activities linked to the Speculative Education Research Project imagining futures scenarios in rural environment.  On this event I partnered with six incredible designers to comprehensive reflex on the possibilities and limits of speculative design.

Faced with a discomfort to carry on with the Speculative Education Research "Neo Rurals Futures' workshop, we decide to take a sarcastical direction through a fictional character - a designer - that was very excited by the opportunity to design a future internet connection devise for people from Tanzania. Our final design aimed to represent an aberrant  "wii-fi-spear".

Colaborative creation >   

Title: “We did something for Africa”

Author: Eliza Chojnacka, Markel Cormenzana, Sabrina Haas, Elena Hess-Rheingans, James Hillman, Yang Li and Camila Monteiro Pereira

Year of production: 2019

Can we speculate about other peoples’ realities? 

Is it better to act well-intentioned on an uninformed opinion than do nothing? 

Is deciding not to design the most radical act of design? 

Can knowledge ever be neutral? 

Is speculation possible without projecting one’s own desires or fears? 

Where is the gray area between inspiration and colonization? 

The We Did Something for Africa project, realized during the SpeculativeEdu NeoRural Futures workshop, focused on a brief situated in the small village of Lushoto in Tanzania. The brief and process introduced a number of questions that focused on the speculative practice itself, which were embodied in the self-reflexive project as it attempted to address current criticisms. The discussion is embodied in the satirical representation of uncritical and constrained approaches in speculative practice, which are unfortunately still common. 

This grotesque answer questions the reliability of designers as imagination of collective futures. Exposing failures of designing processes was based from the beginning on discomfort with the role which we were given. To avoid designing for a place to which we have no right connection, we chose to prevent others from following the consequences of post colonization.

On June 24th, I attended this seminar as a listener. There, both professors Zoy Anastassakis - designer and PHD in Anthropology - and Raquel Noronha  - designer and PHD in Anthropology - gave an inspiring lecture on the designer turn in Anthropology as promoted by George Marcus, Tim Ingold and Arturo Escobar. Their experiences' account encouraged me to continue in my pursuit of a research in the convergence between Anthropology and Design.   

Career anxiety
Text by Camila Monteiro Pereira,
Ruben Pater, and all participants

When people think about designer and her/his work, often what comes to mind is the idea of creativity, innovation and novelty. This notion is fed by social influence (class, family, education, and the professional life) and also affects the way designers promote themselves. Besides the subtle implicit rhetoric of individual glamorization and the romanticized notion of this profession,
designers are still formed by design schools that reinforce and replicate a pattern of what is established about what a designer should be and should do. As a matter of fact, very often the person considering the pursuit of this profession, has the expectation of acquiring professional skills in order to be ready to enter the labor market. As an example, it is imperative that designers build a portfolio – where she or he will select works that are considered worth, present themselves as productive and creative as possible on social media, and put a lot of effort in showcasing their work. This is a process that implies auto-censorship and can lead to career anxiety and other emotional distress, very characteristic of our post-millennium era. Once designers are aware of how their socio-cultural context influences their work, they can make better, more informed decisions on, for example, how to promote themselves in social media. By recognizing design responsibility, designers can also add accountability to their practice and the final product. Criticizing the modes of production and the social structure influence on design is not a rejection of the design work, but an effort to raise questions to better understand the place one is situated, and from there to become more aware of trends, such as those that accelerate market-driven conformity. We embraced the idea of using provocative posters to promote thoughts on how the actual design system can work as a suppressor to the emergence of alternative models of design. We hope to engage the public by triggering and stimulating curiosities that may lead them to become interested on this subject.