Design as a Practice of Correspondence
2020–2021, Methodslab II, Köln International School of Design
As part of the course Design as a Practice of Correspondence, Master’s students at the KISD explored urban environments beyond anthropocentric perspectives. The starting point was the question of what it means to inhabit a city when ‘animals, materials, devices, atmospheres and other things’ are understood as equal actors who ‘influence our actions just as much as we influence their existence in this world’ (García Molina and Weidle 2019).
The starting point for the design exploration was the concept of Correspondences (2019) by the British anthropologist Tim Ingold. ‘To correspond with the world is not to describe or represent it, but to respond to it’. Ingold’s approach focuses on the design of ongoing, process-oriented, open-ended, dialogical, inclusive and future-oriented worlds. His ecological anthropology examines the interplay between human and non-human species, as well as between organic and inorganic materials, which mutually affect one another and possess their own agency (Ingold 2016). olina and Weidle 2019).
Against this theoretical backdrop, the students set out to explore forms of Correspondence in urban environments. They investigated relational structures and interactions between a wide variety of urban actors in order to develop new approaches to design practice and spatial production. In doing so, they adopted a research-through-design approach, which aims to generate knowledge through design by employing imagination, speculation (Gunn and Donovan 2016) and improvisation as methods for visualising hybrid mappings (Baxter et al. 2021).
The course formed part of the Methods Labs II programme within the Integrated Design Master’s programme, which is organised on an ongoing basis by the Design Theory and Research teaching and research group. I was invited by the Integrated Interactions Lab, a project of the Digital Learning Transfer Fellowshipprogramme, funded by the Stifterverband and the Reinhardt Frank Foundation.
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Dr. Simon Meienberg 