FLUX '23 Design Commoning
7th June 2023
The Institute for Design Innovation FLUX ‘23 symposium focused on the theme of Design Commoning. This was hosted alongside a showcase of research and teaching at the Institute and an exhibition of selected Master’s student outputs from across each of the programmes.
What does it mean to live in common? We might answer this question by way of critique and, after all, there is still much to critique – gentrification, the privatization of public space, commodification of housing and natural resources, and the financialization of knowledge and health, among others.
Or, finding ourselves at the limits of critique, we may employ constructive politics that are less susceptible to elite capture1, asking ourselves how we can sustain a way of life that is shared equally with others and then, building it. This requires mutuality of praxis, the interplay of theory-practice towards liberation.
Design is inherently implicated in the construction of these everyday intimacies, both material and immaterial. As such, the overarching design symposium theme of FLUX aims to provide a space where academics and activists can employ praxis towards/of commoning. What, then, do we mean when we say ‘the commons’? There is the materiality of the commons (e.g. shared land, shared resources), the more abstract (e.g. knowledge commons, cultural commons), and the commons as a social system (e.g. the reproduction of community through engagement with commoning practices), but all centred on the malleable and at times contested notions of sharing, reciprocity, collaboration, and care. Perhaps even more grounding is the collective positioning of the commons and commoning practices as inherently oppositional to capitalist assumptions of private property and accumulation. To live in common is political in a base anthropological sense; it is a decision (constantly reiterated and challenged) of how to distribute power.
With this understanding, we hope to think through responsibilities of impact as much as intent of the designer by attuning ourselves to the broader community discourses in this space and wondering where we might share in the sort of knowledge production that feeds the undercommons,2 rather than the institution alone. To be sustainable, however, requires a generative approach to the concept of Flux and the capacity to embrace our own mutability- to remain designers in praxis and question what the role means in our broader communities.
The FLUX symposium considered these questions and provocations through the intertwined themes of commoning as care, commoning as praxis, and commoning as resilience. The symposium included a panel discussion on the theme of Urban Commoning and Gentrification with activist Aysen Dennis, writer and journalist Anna Minton, Professor of urban studies Paul Watt. The keynote was given by Dr Maria Carrizosa on the theme of Commoning in Informal Contexts’. The symposium programme is downloadable at the following link.