Search

Title:
Commons in design

Actions:

• Buy book

Price:
$47.00
(available in store)

Summary:
The scarcity of resources, climate change, and the digitalization of everyday life are fuelling the economy of swapping, sharing, and lending—all of which are in some way linked to a culture of commoning. In this context, we understand commons as community-based processes that use, collectively manage, and organize generally accessible resources—referring to both goods and knowledge. "Commons in design" explores the meaning and impact of commons—especially knowledge-based peer commons—and acts of commoning in design. It discusses networked, participatory, and open procedures based on the commons and commoning, testing models that negotiate the use of commons within design processes. In doing so, it critically engages with questions regarding designers’ positionings, everyday practices, self-understandings, ways of working, and approaches to education.

Title:
Spatializing justice: Building blocks

Actions:

• Buy book

Price:
$29.95
(available in store)

Summary:
''Spatializing justice'' calls for architects and urban designers to do more than design buildings and physical systems. Architects should take a position against inequality and practice accordingly. With these thirty short, manifesto-like texts—building blocks for a new kind of architecture—Spatializing Justice offers a practical handbook for confronting social and economic inequality and uneven urban growth in architectural and planning practice, urging practitioners to adopt approaches that range from redefining infrastructure to retrofitting McMansions. These building blocks call for expanded modes of practice, through which architects can imagine new spatial procedures, political and economic strategies, and modalities of sociability. Challenging existing exclusionary policies can advance a more experimental architecture not bound by formal parameters. Architects must think of themselves as designers not only of things but of civic processes, complicate the ideas of ownership and property, and imagine new sites of research, pedagogy, and intervention. As one of the texts advises, ''The questions must be different questions if we want different answers.''

Title:
Design to live: Everyday inventions from a refugee camp

Actions:

• Buy book

Price:
$39.95
(available in store)

Summary:
This book shows how, even in the most difficult conditions–forced displacement, trauma, and struggle–design can help create a life worth living. ''Design to live'' documents designs, inventions, and artworks created by Syrian refugees living in the Azraq Refugee Camp in Jordan. Through these ingenious and creative innovations–including the vertical garden, an arrangement necessitated by regulations that forbid planting in the ground; a front hall, fashioned to protect privacy; a baby swing made from recycled desks; and a chess set carved from a broomstick–refugees defy the material scarcity, unforgiving desert climate, and cultural isolation of the camp. Written in close collaboration with the residents of the camp, with text in both English and Arabic, ''Design to live,'' reflects two perspectives on the camp: people living and working in Azraq and designers reflecting on humanitarian architecture within the broader field of socially engaged art and design. Architectural drawings, illustrations, photographs, narratives, and stories offer vivid testimony to the imaginative and artful ways that residents alter and reconstruct the standardized humanitarian design of the camp–and provide models that can be replicated elsewhere. The book is the product of a three-year project undertaken by MIT Future Heritage Lab, researchers and students with Syrian refugees at the Azraq Refugee Camp, CARE, Jordan, and the German-Jordanian University.

Title:
Meeting grounds

Actions:

• Buy book

Price:
$24.50
(available in store)

Summary:
The Meeting Grounds programme of online, participatory events that took place from March to June 2020, at the height of the first wave of the pandemic, sought to examine this limited access, whilst simultaneously exploring the new spaces of community we have produced in response. This resulting publication features the work of 35 selected artists, researchers, designers and writers who took part in the programme. The Meeting Grounds publication therefore acts as a continuation of the ideas and conversations exchanged during this time period as well as an exploration into the social, political and cultural changes that have occurred since the beginning of 2020. In doing so, it hopes to unravel our evolving relationships with space and place, the effects these changes have had on our bodily behaviours, habitual practices and movements and the ways in which we recognise, form and maintain locality, community, connection and care.

Title:
Collaborative tools for community architecture

Actions:

• Buy book

Price:
$50.50
(available to order)

Summary:
As community becomes a more dominant paradigm in how architecture is produced, more people become involved in its creation. This implies a change in the role of the architect from being an individual author to a facilitator, from being an independent expert to establishing and managing collaboration. With a wealth of detailed analysis and clear, well-designed graphics, this volume offers practical tools for a truly collaborative architecture that is based on analysis, management, data collection and design. Avilla-Royo demonstrates how the architectural project becomes an instrument for citizen involvement in decision-making and how citizen involvement offers an exciting opportunity to improve the design and everyday uses of architecture.

Title:
Terrain critique

Actions:

• Buy book

Price:
$41.95
(available to order)

Summary:
L’enquête qui fait l’objet de cet ouvrage dresse le récit d’une intégration progressive de l’action culturelle et artistique en urbanisme. Face à un contexte de défiance à son égard, elle décrit un urbanisme qui s’ouvre à des compétences en matière de médiation, d’animation et de communication. Et dépeint, à l’inverse, un monde de l’art impatient d’investir cette nouvelle niche de la commande publique urbaine. L’intrigue qui s’y joue laisse percevoir l’émergence d’un nouvel esprit de l’urbanisme.

Title:
The design of tactics. Critical practices transforming public spaces.

Actions:

• Buy book

Price:
$33.00
(available to order)

Summary:
This publication explores the significance of encounters between people and culture in public spaces, points of encounter where they may take place, and counterpoints which may be contained, silenced, or expressed within them. It presents the process and initial outcomes of a three-year investigation into the design of tactical interventions, actions, strategies, and other experiences for revitalising and enhancing the quality of marginal and neglected public spaces in today’s European cities. Public spaces are where many of the contests and negotiations over culture and integration are taking place, whether through participatory activities, activism, or the appropriation in and of these spaces.

Title:
Dream, play, build: Hands-on community engagement for enduring spaces and places

Actions:

• Buy book

Price:
$30.95
(available to order)

Summary:
For twenty years, James Rojas and John Kamp have been looking to art, creative expression, and storytelling to shake up the classic community meeting. In this book, they share their insights into building common ground and inviting active participation among diverse groups. Their approach, “Place It!,” draws on three methods: the interactive model-building workshop, the pop-up, and site exploration using our senses. Using our hands to build and create is central to what makes us human, helping spark ideas without relying on words to communicate. Deceptively playful, this method is remarkably effective at teasing out community dreams and desires from hands-on activities. The book offers wisdom distilled from workshops held around the world, and a deep dive into the transformational approach and results from the South Colton community in southern California.

Title:
Toward the not yet: art as public practice

Actions:

• Buy book

Price:
$25.95
(available to order)

Summary:
This volume from BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, combines handbook, dictionary, and anthology to investigate artistic practice aimed at achieving social change. With text and visual essays, definitions, exercises, interviews, and images, the contributors envision a praxis that is committed to experimenting with aesthetics and politics in ways that go beyond the conventions of Western modernity. These are practices that are interdisciplinary, theoretically informed, and politically driven, offering ways of "being together otherwise." Catalyzed by the work of artist Jeanne van Heeswijk, which focuses on radicalizing civic processes, ''Toward the not-yet' imagines and enacts alternative ways of conceiving the present and future. Contributors, among them notable artists, scholars, activists, and writers consider ways of participating in civic life, including "dreamscaping" and "radical listening"; the creation of safer spaces for humans and nonhumans; ways of radically shifting laws and policies; and tactics and methods of collective sanctuary. ''Toward the not-yet'' is part of BAK's series of BASICS readers, debuting a SUPERBASICS variation that is larger, with more visual content.

Title:
Participatory design thinking in urban design education

Actions:

• Buy book

Price:
$60.00
(available to order)

Summary:
Since the Boyer of 1996 of "Building Communities: A New future for Architectural Education and Practice" there has been some movements in architectural and design schools and practitioners exploring ways to inculcate a concern for larger social issues in the design process. Several alternative approaches to the education, practice of architecture and urban design have emerged rooted in the Social Architecture based on four groups of participants; the private visionary; the public professional with a vision; the professional based at non-profit organizations and the activist university. The urban laboratory model is one such model housed in the activist university. One of the arguments for this methodology is that it would lead to a better place-making process.