‘Postcards from the Future’ by Dr. José Allard

The ‘Critical Change’ Talk Series

Our first speaker in this year’s Critical Change series is Dr José Allard, Associate Professor, School of Design, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. José is also currently an academic visitor at the University of Edinburgh where he is working with the Critical Change group and the MA Design for Change programme so this event is also a warm welcome to him and an opportunity to introduce him to the School of Design here at ECA.

José’s abstract:

‘Postcards from the Future: Designing Speculative Scenarios with Practical Sense?’

The world is in crisis. It seems that the pandemic has finally forced us to seriously rethink our way of life. There are many calls to change the practices that have characterized our social, political, economic and environmental system. Design creates futures. What designers project might become our future. Because of this, Design is a unique discipline, allowing us to foresee scenarios of Change. In other words, we are called to creatively project our future now. This lecture presents exercises developed during the last year in design workshops in Chile, Mexico and Italy. The projects mediate between practical solutions based on emerging trends and speculative scenarios that seek to provoke and question the state of the situation. These “snapshots of tomorrow” also highlight the creative relationship between rule-following and formal experimentation in designing plausible futures.

Links to further information:

Download the Design for Emergency book here: https://diseno.uc.cl/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Disen%CC%83os-para-la-Emergencia.pdf

You can visit the Design for Resilience website, where you can see more up-to-date projects (including those in the book). 

You can also check out the Guemil Project website (pictograms for emergency‘Postcards from the Future: Designing Speculative Scenarios with Practical Sense?’