Estudio Abierto / Open Studio is a platform for collaboration between design and allied disciplines, a platform for critical rethinking and action—practicing empathic urbanism for the anthropocene.
Estudio Abierto / Open Studio is a platform for collaboration between design and allied disciplines, a platform for critical rethinking and action—practicing empathic urbanism for the anthropocene.
According to UNHCR, currently, 84 million people are displaced globally. Many end up in refugee camps, many are dispersed into cities, many are trafficked, and many are lost in the process… We, as designers in the broadest sense, urgently feel the need to rethink how we can engage with such a global issue, that has been brought to our attention all the more by the crisis in Ukraine.
The workshop is an exploration of how to integrate and welcome displaced communities into our daily lives. Synergie between the locals and the migrants is a key factor here. Beyond empathy, we start with improvisations that can help the city welcome ‘refugees’
We wish to broaden the notion of ‘displacement’ to mean a forced ‘unsettling’ of individuals, communities and people at many different scales. Therefore, we aim at global displacements (due to political, economic or cultural conditions), but also local ones: people displaced among us such as the elderly, the lonely, children, homeless, people with disabilities or impairments, etc. We see the core issue is that of providing a place for them, a sense of belonging, and we want to explore design ideas to tackle this problem. Design for us could range from any scale and domain, including but not limited to: architectural, urban design/policy, landscape, digital infrastructure, product and placemaking etc.
We start from a position of decoloniality, we do not aim to use the crisis as a showcase for our fantasies and utopian dreams as designers. Perhaps, the design could just be mapping the relevant actors and designing speculative interconnections between them. Put simply, we aim to be useful, to have some impact, to be sincere and have modest ideas that can be of help.
We will be introducing the multidisciplinary dimension of the problem: we will have introductory talks by sociologists, politicians, anthropologists, psychologists, urban thinkers and architects. This will facilitate a complex understanding of the overall refugee / displacement crisis and move us away from naive, simplistic design ventures.
This workshop, therefore, is open to anyone interested in the current Ukraine crisis and the arrival of the refugees to the European cities, but we encourage other refugee situations as well. It is open to any allied discipline that practices a design approach: architecture, art, urban design, landscape, strategic design, product design etc. It is open to undergraduate/graduate students as well as professionals/academics.
We do not see ourselves as instructors to impart knowledge, rather, we are facilitators of a collaborative learning process. We seek participants who bring their own agenda, site, issues, problems, experiences related to refugees, displacements and the city.
The workshop structure:
22 AUG / Day 1: Introductory lectures
23 AUG / Day 2: Site identification + background research and analysis
24 AUG /Day 3: Design ideation + exploration of iterations
25 AUG / Day 4: Design development
26 AUG / Day 5: Final Reviews
The workshop will be conducted in English, virtually through Google meet platform, and is free to attend. The best candidates will be selected to join the programme based on the details in the registration form.
Facilitators: Dr Paco Mejias, Open Studio Daria Ozhyhanova, Programme Director BA, Kharkiv School of Architecture, Ukraine Dr Junjie Xi, University of Liverpool, UK Elin Strand Ruin, KTH, Stockholm, Sweden Dr Tanzil Shafique, University of Sheffield, UK