Class Design, Non Design

Design/ Non Design starts from a wager: that the most urgent design questions of our time are rarely found inside the discipline. They surface in a mine, a garden, a bakery, a supply chain-sites where design's tools (representation, mediation, world-building) are needed precisely because design as a named profession is absent or unwelcome. This course asks students-researchers to leave the studio's disciplinary comfort and follow an agenda instead of a brief: a live, contested issue that a rotating research topic (extraction, care, politics, food systems, labour, infrastructure) makes visible. While visual communication can still be an harbour-the students' native language and toolkit-but it's not the destination. Students are asked to let the agenda reshape the tools, not the reverse. The course is deliberately collaborative and interdisciplinary.

Not applicable

* The chosen agenda: immersion and positioning Deep-dive research into the semester's live topic (extraction, care, politics of design, food systems, or a comparable agenda) through primary sources, site visits, and dialogue with practitioners/researchers working directly in the field. Students build a shared research base before any visual decision is made. * Beyond the discipline: methods on loan Borrowing and adapting research methods from adjacent fields-ethnography, political ecology, oral history, mapping, archival research, field research-testing where visual communication can serve them and where it must yield to them. * Collective authorship and the visual outcome Development of a shared visual response (publication, exhibition, map, film, campaign, or comparable format) through group critique, negotiated authorship, and iterative production-treating collaboration itself as a design problem.

* A single, deeply researched live agenda per semester rather than a menu of design briefs-depth over disciplinary breadth. * Direct engagement with researchers and practitioners working on the topic outside design (as in prior editions' collaborations around extraction, colonial botanical history, and food systems research). * Mandatory collective production: no individual final pieces, only group-authored outcomes, with grading structures built to reward distributed labour rather than individual visibility

Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Duke University Press. Gómez-Barris, M. (2017). The extractive zone: Social ecologies and decolonial perspectives. Duke University Press. Manzini, E. (2015). Design, when everybody designs: An introduction to design for social innovation. MIT Press. Papanek, V. (1971). Design for the real world: Human ecology and social change. Pantheon Books.