MARGINÀLIA, Interdependent Design Processes and the Ethics of Care.

Abstract

In this article we present MARGINALIA, an academic experience of design carried out within the context of the Final Bachelor of Design Projects of the Visual Creation mention. MARGINALIA is a collaborative workshop that aim to be a tool for amplifying the first drafts of the Final Design Project. It’s a process-oriented design approach, exploratory and experimental. The designers intrude (interfere, involve, intermediate) in the project of the others, developing and extending it towards territories that the author could barely imagine. Applying the ethics of care to the project of design we explore new paths to reinvent the design project and move it from a personal outcome to an interdependent result. We argue that design practices have the capacity to foster cooperation, empathy and shared creation through the vision of ethics of care. We embrace the point of view of the design of care and we transform the design project into a relational infrastructure and a network of interdependencies. With MARGINALIA we inseminate a way of projecting forgetting the traditional design project, which privilege abstract principles, formal rules, impersonal duties and deliberative justice. And we promote a new paradigm where design project is relational.