Refocusing Ideas and Actions
Asynchronous Session
Mutating Leadership Awareness through Transformative Cultures: Speculating on the Role of Negative Knowledge and Power in Empowering Creative Talents View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Francesco Galli
This paper explores how leaders must "transform" their awareness and adapt it to conflicting and uncertain contexts. Firstly, I argue that creative leaders may benefit from acquiring a mutated awareness. I then suggest that to withhold a leading attitude, leaders must reinforce their leadership role in a creative and cultural system. Secondly, I introduce Deleuze’s binomial concept of “territories” and argue that this knowledge prepares future leaders with the potential to empower their awareness and acknowledge the power dynamics from a geopolitical dimension. Thirdly I introduce the paradigm of “power dynamics” and suggest that the speculation of “negative knowledge” is essential in the creative education. In conclusion, to cope with the complexity and uncertainty, creative talents must absorb knowledge apparently excluded from the visible "transformative design process" which is generated by apparently collateral cultural crises and conflicts of interest.
Experimenting Community-Based Design Strategies to Transform Post-industrial Buildings in Balance with Nature View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Yong Huang, Jack Collins
Ecological urbanism is not a theory to create new cities. To fundamentally establish a human habitat in balance with nature, we must work within existing cites and legacies of urban form, infrastructures, and social practices, as biophysical, economic, governance, and social contexts for the people, cultures, and practices (Hes& Bush, 2018). Designed by Albert Kahn in 1905, the Packard Automotive Plant in Detroit is an icon of the era of Fordism. The original facility employed 40,000 workers at its peak and was innovative with its use of a large open warehouse floor plan supported by reinforced concrete for its 3.5 million square feet. This once goliath of industry slumped during postwar luxury automotive decline and has been abandoned since 2010. Now, the ‘eye sore’ for Detroit locals serves as a beacon attracting urban explorers, vandals, artists like Banksy, and shows like the GrandTour, that celebrate its haunting beauty. In this design-based research, we use photogrammetry combined with other digital media, not only to document and represent this legacy site and building of the Packard Automotive Plant, but also to generate a series urban design prototype, showcasing opportunities and possibilities to foster a vibrant community to transform its neighborhood. These prototypes, on multiple urban, architectural, and interior scales, focus on both eco-diversity as well as its integration with diversified building programs, including interchangeable public and private spaces, flexible communal and discrete functions, and multi-scaled vertical urban farming.
What’s Old Is New: the Study of Transformative Potential of Suburban Malls: A Methodology for Adaptive Reuse in the Case Big Box Retail Environments View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Anna Gitelman
In recent years the adaptive reuse debate has seen a growing interest in emerging theories in which the concept of potential plays an essential role. This research focuses on highlighting transformative patterns within adaptive reuse practices and addresses the concept of potential in the dynamic of building transformation. It examines the adaptive reuse possibilities for the big box stores and malls in terms of economic, social, architectural, and environmental impact and their ‘transformative potential’. According to Credit Suisse estimates, between 20–25% of existing malls will close between 2022-2025, and developers around the world are looking for ways to reposition these underperforming assets. In many cases, these abandoned big box stores and malls did have a historic impact on their communities. Many of these buildings represent a time of economic growth and provide for the community with local taxes, jobs, and opportunities for small business development. They also became large social hubs and shaped how the community physically developed and grew. The vacant space is a blemish on the community both economically and physically and the effort to repurpose the space and to reinvest into it to help the community grow and strengthen the identity of the area has become even more important. This study proposes a conceptual framework specifically for decision-makers linked to the adaptive reuse of shopping malls. Through the methodological approach that includes multiple case studies, this research analyzes effectively adapted buildings to test the “transformative potential” as a relationship between matter and space in a specific time.
Experimental Publishing: Challenging Colonial Ways of Knowings in Design Education Through Student-Led Projects View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mauve Pagé
How can a design instructor bring anti-racist and decolonization theory into students' design practices? Over 5 years, the Publication Design Project class has evolved from a course that experiments with the idea of publications from a designer’s point of view to a student-led class that challenges students to examine their positionalities, explores place-based design practices and expands on notions of accountability in an attempt to decenter white colonial design history and practices. The conceptual potential of artist book/designer publications was explored, decoded and reinterpreted as students were encouraged to observe and implement different ways of knowing and to challenge the idea of "good" design. This paper is a reflection on the latest offering of the class, featuring the students’ collaborative work in organizing a tri-campus publication exhibition.
