Welcome!

Designing Economic Cultures is a research project that sets out to investigate the relationship between socio-economic precarity and the production of socially and politically engaged design projects.

The fundamental question the project poses is:
how can designers, who through their work want to question and challenge the prevalent economic system, gain a satisfying degree of social and economic security without having to submit themselves to the commercial pressures of the market?  Read more ›

Construction site for non-affirmative practice

Constructive Dismantling

My Castle Is Your Castle

Werkstattgespräche – Faculty of Design and Art, Free University of Bolzano-Bozen, 19.12.2011

Giorgio Camuffo invited the Construction site for non-affirmative practice to host a roundtable discussion at the Faculty of Design and Art of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano as part of the series Werkstattgespräche.

THINGS THAT CAME UP DURING THE DISCUSSION

– the importance of developing a broad imaginary of what it means to be a designer;
– the gap between our generation of designers and older ones;
– the importance that career ambitions play in order for us to accept precarity;
– the challenges designers have to face once out of the academic world and the responsibility of academia assumes here;
– the responsibility of tutors for preparing students not to accept precarity as a given, but to work towards breaking with this model;
– the obligation of educational institutions to avoid the abuse of power by tutors in exploiting free-labour;
– the wish to discover and create new social models of how we approach the world and each other;