International Colloquium organized by FHNW Academy of Art and Design, Basel, at the Museum of Cultures, Basel, Switzerland.
Keynote Speech: Interstitial Maps for Design Pedagogy: Connective Materialities in the Making
by Leyla Neri, Director of Fashion Design and Strategic Design & Management Programs, Parsons Paris, The New School
Design education and design research certainly contribute to the rethinking of the political conditions of the present. It is worth trying to question studio-based pedagogy as a tool to delineate the investigative territories of design through new projections of “otherness”. The paper will address the contents and outcomes of three pedagogical experiences based on the exploration of multiple sites, historical narratives and searches for alterity. They are analyzed as pedagogical scenarios of cultural articulation. The methods experimented envisage design as a dynamic site for the production of cultural difference, that is as the nexus of plural materialities at the crossroads of entangled times, historicities and geographies. Design teaching is therefore redefined as a social agent that allows for innovative cultural incursions and for the expression of new identities in the process of being formed.
