At a time of escalating socio-environmental crises and a world driven by rapid technological advancements, rethinking design’s role and impact has become urgent. Today's conflicts over resources represent deeper clashes between different ways of understanding and relating to nature. Design has long been involved in the creation and imposition of particular worlds—material and spatial conditions that shape how life is lived and understood. Far from being a neutral practice, design actively promotes and reifies certain ways of being and relating to nature, privileging Western, Anglo-European modes of thought. As these designed worlds are imposed, they entrench unequal power relations, with power flowing through the material and spatial conditions that regulate how human and non-human life coexist. Design is torn between the potential of what it can become and the lingering presence of what it must leave behind to break away from its anthropocentric and modern/colonial legacy and imagine its relation to nature otherwise.

This course takes this tension head-on by exploring the agency of plants, animals, rivers, etc. (but not only) in the design of unequal power relationships. Drawing from positions sensitive to power differentials, especially those challenging Global North-centric discourses and practices—from decolonial and gender theories to feminist posthumanisms—we will examine design's ongoing complicity in extractive regimes that oppress peoples and natures alike. We will critically examine power dynamics in and through design as they relate to the control, exploitation, and commodification of nature—a co-constitution made tangible through particular material and spatial configurations. The course seeks to foster a deeper, non-modern understanding of nature, viewing it as that which enables relations to emerge, develop, and be sustained, ultimately understanding design as a more-than-human world-making activity that articulates relations of power.

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This course will be taught by Franca López Barbera

https://frannnca.com