Sustainability and Resilience
Asynchronous Session
A Sensory Exploration of Green and Sustainable Community Living: Exploring Intentional Communities through Sensory Ethnography View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Andrea Wheeler
In recent years, intentional communities have gained popularity as an alternative to the fast-paced and often unsustainable lifestyle of industrialized cities. These communities are built around a shared set of values and have organizational principles, which often include a deep appreciation, sometimes spiritual in expression, for the natural environment and a desire to live in harmony with it. However, the ways in which these communities self-govern and embody these values are not well explored nor understood. In this research and through case studies adopting sensory ethnology, and with reference to the work of Sarah Pink, I explore the foundational ideas of such intentional communities across the world, including amongst others: Findhorn, and the Earthship community of New Mexico. Visiting a variety of intentional communities and observing how members interact with their built and natural environments and each other, paying particular attention to how they use their senses to navigate and make sense of their surroundings I explore a shared sensibility. Through this research, I elaborate on a deeper understanding of how intentional communities govern themselves in relation to different values and how these values manifest in the designed and built environment. I examine the glue that holds the communities together. This research has the potential to shed new light on the ways in which humans can create more sustainable and fulfilling ways of living together and hold we can design in recognition of new sensibilities.
Featured Urban Mobility Design Policies for Inclusive European Cities View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Claudia Ribeiro Pereira Nunes
Urbanization is currently one of the most important global trends of the 21st century. Urban environments, infrastructures, facilities and services, depending on how they are planned and built, can impede or enable access, participation and inclusion of members of society. Decisions about place design, planning and management can enhance or restrict a sense of belonging policies. The research questions are: Can they increase or reduce feelings of security, stretch or limit boundaries, promote or reduce mobility, and improve or damage health? Can they remove real and imagined barriers between communities and foster understanding and generosity of spirit? The research core is that accessibility has improved over the last decade, and planning policy has shifted, with investment providing new facilities to once-excluded communities. The fact remains that poor and disadvantaged people are far more likely to live in poor-quality environments. Social, cultural and economic inequalities are still being built into new places, and planners and designers need to examine the impact of their decisions. The methodology is the literature review of EU design regulations.
Cultivating Ecological Citizenship - Transformative Design for Sustainable Communities: Exploring Place-Based Approaches, Creative Practices, and Community Engagement in the Pursuit of a Resilient Future View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Daniel Knox, Alec Shepley
Our roles as citizens within our communities can sometimes be unknown and raises questions about our collective efforts. Are we doing the right thing to promote sustainable change and empowering the next generation with resilience? Humanity faces serious challenges in the coming decades: climate change, biodiversity loss, growing inequality, and more. In their current form, our systems seem to incentivise overconsumption, degrade communal bonds, and destroy natural wealth. The message is clear, we can use spaces within our communities better to become better citizens and help ecology thrive for future generations. We can do more to embed and encourage proactive change in our communities by using spaces and materials in a better way through thoughtful design. The researchers in this project believe that place-based approaches and community engagement around the theme of sustainability and ecology, can enable a growing network of ecological citizens. In this paper we explore how through creative practices, the sharing of ideas and thoughts, learning from best practices at a local, national, and international level from a variety of partners can create sustenance for a community-based network, which has the potential to include children and young people in the decision-making process. We consider how examples with embedded creative practice, such as community growers/larders/kitchens and forest schools support partnership working within place-based projects. We show how diverse groups of people can begin to make impactful change through community-focused approaches and community-led practices, activism and collective learning, advocacy, and design thinking in projects.
Design Ethnography Driven Innovation for Urban Sport Communities: A Roman Case Study View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Luca D'Elia, Lorenzo Imbesi, Leandro De Souza Rosa, Alessandro Aiuti, Mariia Ershova, Miriam Saviano, Viktor Malakuczi
Sport serves as a valuable social tool, promoting connections between individuals in society and fostering the creation of safe spaces by developing spontaneous infrastructures in urban areas. This contribution delves into the impact of ethnographic design in innovating the field of sport by acting on spontaneous urban communities, showing tangible effects in urban settings and contributing to the understanding of sport as social phenomena. Its proximity to sociology, design research, and social issues, offers a multidisciplinary perspective on the roles of design. Using a previously developed ethnographic toolkit, a living lab of designers collected and translated raw information into empirical data for design practices. The study investigates the dynamics of sport as spontaneous catalysts of interactions by focusing on urban sport communities and their societal roles, inclusivity, and main challenges. Considering the municipality of Rome, 65 communities have been identified, of which 8 have actively collaborated with young designers to explore their identity and define tailored solutions. Finally, the toolkit's findings were compared to the designers’ projects to evaluate the toolkit's effectiveness and relevance. The outcomes demonstrate design’s capacity to investigate specific connections and interactions within each sport community (such as game setup, training methods, communication within and outside the group) and promote their growth and cohesion using insight derived from the research toolkit. Findings of the Research, as the individual projects derived, hold significance for citizens as for policy makers and urban planners who want to design and advocate for more inclusive urban social development models and thriving neighborhoods.
Special and Inclusive Pedagogy for an Integrated Design: Co-designing Museum Accessibility Pathways with People with Disabilities View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tommaso Santilli, Karrie Shogren, Ilaria D'angelo, Noemi Del Bianco, Catia Giaconi
The recent years have seen a notable evolution in the relationship between museums and communities. This tendency, particularly relying on information and communication technologies, led to an increasing focus on the design of immersive experiences to increase visitors’ engagement. However, still to this day, the pursuit of such trajectories does not guarantee all visitors full and equal participation opportunities. Indeed, multiple barriers can impede the physical and cultural accessibility of cultural heritage, especially with reference to people with disabilities. The importance of participation to cultural life, recreation and leisure, emphasized by the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006), remarks the need to address these accessibility challenges through universal design solutions oriented by special and inclusive pedagogy frameworks. Indeed, scientific literature underlines how access to culture is a fundamental right, connected to the self-determination and Quality of Life of people with disabilities. In this context, this contribution illustrates co-design educational experiences of an integrated inclusive museum pathway aimed at enhancing the physical and cultural accessibility of a local museum in the Marche Region. With the direct involvement of people with disability through a participatory methodology, our research group co-designed, developed and tested innovative solutions incorporating multisensory technologies and accessible storytelling to create an inclusive museum experience. The findings of this study provide valuable insights for the development of inclusive design solutions in museum contexts, promoting equal opportunities of participation in social and cultural life.
