Design, technical action and sustainability
Designscapes Un-Conference

Online, Streaming on Facebook Live
Thursday, 30 September 2021 09:00am CEST
Politecnico DAStU | Website
Designscapes Un-Conference | Webpage Eventi DAStU
Designscapes | Website

The final plenary of DESIGNSCAPES UN-Conference is entitled “Design, Technical Action & Sustainability”, hosting prof. Andrew Feenberg as keynote speaker.

Prof. Feenberg will present the foundations of his instrumentalization theory, which was originally proposed – about 20 years ago – for the analysis of design in terms of a dual nature of functionality, being at the same time technologically driven and culturally shaped. DESIGNSCAPES owns a lot to this intuition, which goes beyond constructivism in so far as it gives explicit recognition of the crucial importance of people’s engagement within the process of sense making that design attributes to technology. Quite interestingly, as the author states in his latest book, the theory of instrumentalization adds an element of contingency to the process, implying multiple “right” answers to technical questions, depending on who is asked what – that is, on the particular interests and beliefs that shape the answers. This does not only add a communitarian dimension to design, it also suggests a new and somehow unexpected role for public policy, namely to recognize the importance of social struggle and political agency in sociotechnical development and to reconnect the causal determinations of technical systems to culturally specific notions of well-being as perceived by the general public. It therefore opens the technical sphere of innovation to the uncertain if not controversial judgments we normally associate with politics.

Relatori | Andrea Bonaccorsi, Dino Borri, Massimo Bricocoli, Grazia Concilio, Giorgio Costantino, David Crombie, Andrew Feenberg, Simone Gheri, Laura Hetel, Francesco Molinari.

Responsabili | Grazia Concilio