C U M U L U S – B O G O T Á – 2 0 1 9
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In the dawn of the new millennium, the design is experiencing a moment of expansion, recognition, mutation and integration, other disciplines would envy. It retains its aura and transcends the realm of the tangible becoming a form of thought, dialogue and ontology. The turn of the millennium has staged disruptions and catastrophes: from wars against terror to exacerbated fundamentalism; from the financial crises to the flood of inequities and migrations.
In the absence of better words, the «post» prefix has characterized the last half-century: postmodern, postfeminist, post capitalist, post humanist, post truth. Before creating post design, would it be worth thinking about an after design? Can design capture another vision of the human being, cultures and ecosystems that surround humans? Have designers thought about what will happen next?
We are a species that mutates and subsists revealing great adaptive capacities. We manage to debate emerging issues, without fear of experimental vocabularies while being critical, collaborative and speculative. Design today is transdisciplinary and plural.
Hosting Cumulus in Colombia is the result of this transition, placing humans in a border crossing, in an eclectic habitat a place as contradictory and vital as the change of the millennium. When design is about thinking in action and transition, it questions its original logic and gives birth to diversity. In Bogotá, Colombia, different perspectives will be found transcending the discipline, questioning what will become of design: the design, after.
Sensing the City,
Sensing the Rural
Tracks Chairs
Isabel Arteaga
Andrés Burbano
This track deals with the ongoing radical transformations that the urban and the rural spaces are experiencing in the post-digital times. Transformations that are the result of the tensions between the computational and the physical domains, that affect both cityscapes and landscapes. The track seeks to examine the role of technology in the urban-rural balance. How can we reinforce connections between rural and urban spaces? How can information extracted from these spaces be used? How can design at different scales benefit from technology to observe, perceive and build the territory? If by 2050, two-thirds of the world population will live in cities, how will this impact rural environments?
Somewhere, Nowhere, Anyone, Everyone
Tracks Chairs
Santiago de Francisco
Carolina Blanco
Daniel Huertas
One of the dominant design narratives since the mid-nineteenth century has to do with its centrality in fostering consumerism. However, in the second half of the same century, behavioural researchers started thinking about alternatives to market economies and the emergence of new ecologies. Contemporary design is still looking for different ways to establish a more responsible, long-term and healthy relationship with the environment and its context. From consumption and individualism, the design has transcended to promote a strong consciousness on the scarcity of resources and the importance of environmentally mindful local communities. Is it possible for designers to learn and design along with small communities? Can social sciences and design work together in providing ways of thinking and methodologies to empower communities instead of finished products? Can design reach beyond the framework of market-driven economies? Can design methodologies help tackle wicked problems?
Fiction and
De-innovation
Tracks Chairs
Javier Ricardo Mejía
The focus of the track is the articulation between world-making exercises and design methods that reformulate the identity of design. New domains have emerged that include Critical Design, Speculative Design, Design Storytelling . These methods and practices trigger creative, disruptive and conscious architectural and design practices by applying technological developments combined with ideation and speculation. The result generates spontaneous designs that are both, efficient and imaginative. Can the relationship between design, fiction, architecture and games redefine the role of each specific field? Can the intersection of these fields provoke a revision of the rhetorical innovation? Can these design processes lead to novelty without repeating innovation as a dry formula?
Design and
Counterculture
Tracks Chairs
Daniel Huertas
Christiaan Nieman
The term counterculture historically refers to different moments when mainstream cultural values and institutions were challenged, usually by alternative emergent subcultures. Over the past years, counterculture design ventures have proven a strong adaptive capacity to the oftentimes, hostile productive mainstream venues. Non-mainstream design has been especially good at finding cracks around the system and exploit those gaps for the benefit of small communities or finding alternative ways to think and understand social processes. What is the role design could play in creating new production models or economic systems? What role could design play in challenging or presenting alternatives in the way people relate to the territory and the managing of their resources? What strategies could design help to develop, to tackle issues of inequality, social justice, and marginalization? What other possible scenarios could be set for the development of a society and a renewed idea of human progress?
Biodiversity-Driven
Design
Tracks Chairs
Giovanna Danies
Jaime Patarroyo
Pedro Aparicio
Unique and unexplored ecosystems offer an opportunity to spark designers’ imagination and push practices to search for new solutions to everyday needs. The rapid exploitation of natural resources has accelerated climate change, making us question how can we redesign our relationship with the environment without placing its biodiversity at stake? How can the intersection between science and design take research one step further? Is it possible for science and design to question how their knowledge can be better integrated to solve real world problems? Is it possible for designers to incorporate scientific processes in their design practice to widen the scope and impact of their projects?