---
title: Designing in a State of Climate Emergency
page_type: course
track: Reflection
course_type: Short Course
feature_img: /assets/images/2023-24/year-1/t-2/designing-in-a-state-of-climate-emergency.png
img_caption: Credit | Planet Earth rendered by 3D artist Lorna Pittaway for the Billion Seconds Institute
faculty:
    - andres-colmenares
ects: 2
---

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## Syllabus

Following a collective learning-by-doing approach, the students will explore, discuss, reflect, ideate and exchange perspectives, questions and thought experiments, while exercising their collective imaginations with long-term, critical and planetary mindsets to navigate the complexity, scale and speed of change of the multidimensional implications that the digital economy has in the environmental emergency. 

**Keywords: Critical, degrowth, plurality**

### Learning Objectives

- Develop skills to work effectively as a member of groups and networks of people with different levels of expertise, cultural and professional backgrounds.
- Empower students to align their individual and collective learning experience with the cultural, ecological and societal transformations shaping this decade.
- Develop a critical understanding of the socio-economic, socio-technical, and eco-sociological aspects of digital technologies, alongside the ethical, social, environmental and cultural implications emerging from their use at scale.

### Methodological Strategies

- Lectures
- Group discussions
- Collective decision-making and making
- Field trip

## Schedule

The course will follow a week-long, in-person studio format, divided in 4 sessions. Students will organize as one collective around a creative challenge and organize in interdependent smaller teams.

=== "09/01"

    **Session I: Introduction to the Designing in a State of Climate Emergency**
    
    Lecture + Group discussion + Positionality statement workshop


=== "10/01"

    **Session II: Discussing our relationship with time and growth**
    
    Debate on Degrowth + Guest lecturer: Gustavo Nogueira, Temporality Lab

=== "11/01"

    **Session III: Solar-centered designing**
    
    Field trip focused on sentipensar + alternative knowledge exploration in groups

=== "12/01"

    **Session IV: Remembering Futures**
    
    Workshop on visual storytelling + collective reflection

## Deliverables

- Digital postcards/posters and proto-videos
- Reflection essays

## Grading Method

| Percentage  | Description                                                    |
| ----------- | ------------------------------------                           |
| 50%         | Self-assessment of individual engagement                       |
| 50%         | Self-assessment of collective learning                         |

!!! ects "European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS)"

    {{ ects }} ECTS

## Additional Resources

Related articles and essays:

- [The Everything Manifesto](https://www.iam-internet.com/everything)
- [Solar-Centered Designing: an eccentric proposal for Branch Magazine](https://branch.climateaction.tech/issues/issue-4/solar-centered-designing/)
- [‘Provisions - Observing & Archiving COVID-19’ by Site Magazine](https://www.thesitemagazine.com/covid19provisions)
- [Imagining Intercitizenships](https://medium.com/iam-journal/imagining-intercitizenships-f3f4bdc80b68) 
- [‘A question of tech’ by Gauthier Roussilhe](https://gauthierroussilhe.com/en/posts/une-erreur-de-tech)
- [Emergency on Planet Earth by Extinction Rebellion](https://extinctionrebellion.uk/the-truth/the-emergency/+)
  
Recommended publications and books:

- [Logic Magazine](https://logicmag.io/) 
- [Branch Magazine](https://branch.climateaction.tech/)
- 'Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime' by Bruno LaTour 
- ‘Poetics of Relation’ by Édouard Glissant
- ‘The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins’ by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
- ‘Blockchain Chicken Farm’ by Xiaowei Wang
- ‘Critical Hope’ by Dr. Kari Grain
- ‘Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of - Plants’ by Robin Wall Kimmerer
- ‘The Future Is Degrowth A Guide to a World beyond Capitalism’ by Matthias Schmelzer, Aaron Vansintjan, and Andrea Vetter
- ‘Design Justice’ by Sasha Costanza-Chock
- ‘Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds’ by Arturo Escobar
- ‘Black Quantum Futurism Theory & Practice, Volume I’ by Rasheedah Phillips
- ‘Beyond Nature and Culture’ by Philippe Descola
- ‘Stories of your Life and Others’ by Ted Chiang
- ‘The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900’ by David Edgerton

## Faculty

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