Service Design Masterclasses

Speaker: Indy Johar – Executive Director at Dark Matter Labs

Duration: February 21, 4:00 PM – 7:00 PM CET

Language of the Course: English

Price:

• For external professionals: € 95 + VAT
• For students, for masterclasses’ alumni and for professors: € 50 + VAT

To take part in the Masterclass, you must fill in the online application form and pay the registration fee by February 20, 2023.

Indy Johar is focused on the strategic design of new super scale civic assets for transition – specifically at the intersection of financing, contracting and governance for deeply democratic futures.Indy is co-founder of darkmatterlabs.org and of the RIBA award winning architecture and urban practice Architecture00 , a founding director of open systems lab (digitising planning), seeded WikiHouse (open source housing) and Open Desk (open source furniture company). Indy is a non-executive international Director of the BloxHub (Denmark Copenhagen) – the Nordic Hub for sustainable urbanization and was 2016-17 Graham Willis Visiting Professorship at Sheffield University.  He was also Studio Master at the Architectural Association – 2019-2020, UNDP Innovation Facility Advisory Board Member  2016-20 and RIBA Trustee 2017-20. He has taught & lectured at various institutions from the University of Bath, TU-Berlin; University College London, Princeton, Harvard, MIT and New School.Most recently, he was awarded the London Design Medal for Innovation in 2022.

Speaker: Elena Silvestrini – Steering Committee Member at Design Justice Network

Duration: March 2, 4:00 PM – 7:00 PM CET

Language of the Course: English

Price:

• For external professionals – euro 95 + VAT – ENROLL NOW
• For Polimi and POLI.design students, alumni or teachers and for students of other universities – euro 50 + VAT – ENROLL NOW

To take part in the Masterclass, you must fill in the online application form and pay the registration fee by March 1, 2023.

As designers and researchers, how can we challenge, rather than reproduce, structural inequalities when “the communities” we serve are distant or absent in our day-to-day work? How can design be a tool for dreaming and building more just, liberating futures? How can we both practice and embody the justice we want to see? The Design Justice Network challenges the ways that design and designers can harm those who are marginalized by systems of power. It uses design to imagine and build the worlds we need to live in — worlds that are safer, more just, and more sustainable. The Design Justice community advances practices that center those who are normally excluded from and adversely impacted by design decisions in design processes. During this interactive session, we will explore the theory, the history and the practice of Design Justice; we will unpack and interact with its 10 principles and will propose elements of reflection relevant to all design oriented processes.

Elena Silvestrini (she/her) is group facilitator and inclusive process designer interested in queer feminist theory and practice. She is based in Rome (Italy) and is the co-founder of the Design Justice Network Mediterranean node. Elena is the Facilitation and Training Lead at Platoniq Creatividad y Democracia, a Spanish community-centered design organisation, which uses technopolitics: technology for bottom-up political action. Elena focuses on justice-oriented participation methodologies and training implementation. Her work engages with feminist approaches to technology, appropriating tools of oppression for self defence, and power dynamics and values in design process. In 2015, Elena started Chayn Italia, a collective project fighting gender based violence through critical engagement with technology, collaborative practices, and capacity building. Elena is a 2021 Fellow at NewNew, running a training project for women’s aid centers on the dual role of tech in domestic abuse.

Speaker: Anab Jain – Co-founder & Director at Superflux

Duration: March 16, 4:00 PM – 7:00 PM CET

Language of the Course: English

Price:

• For external professionals – euro 95 + VAT – ENROLL NOW
• For Polimi and POLI.design students, alumni or teachers and for students of other universities – euro 50 + VAT – ENROLL NOW

To take part in the Masterclass, you must fill in the online application form and pay the registration fee by March 15, 2023.

The polycrisis we are living through presents challenges that are complex and unprecedented. These novel challenges cannot be addressed with the siloed, rationalist mindset that the industrialised world has become accustomed to . Rather than continue to think in the reductive terms of ‘Problem’ and ‘Solution’ there needs to be a step between that does not seek to accomplish end goals but empower plural possibilities.

Design is often asked to steer toward a solution, but what of a design practice that foregrounds the larger ecological landscape of the problem space? This is the space Speculative Design and many other such adjacent practices have occupied for a long time under many different guises: Radical Design, Critical Design, Discursive Design, Design Fiction and more.

In this Masterclass I will introduce my understanding of Speculative Design as shaped through the lens of my own design practice Superflux. The Masterclass will give attendees a glimpse of the history and practice of Speculative Design, some of the theoretical and practical frameworks it builds upon, the questions it probes designers to ask, the transportative potential it invites and the potential impact it creates in all manner of spheres. Rather than a singular method or toolkit, this design practice asks instead for a poor pedagogy; for practices, which allow us to expose ourselves, and bring us out into the world.

Speculative Design is that which enables possibilities, and at a time when the world is in pressing need of alternatives, the practice of Speculative Design is becoming increasingly central to the shaping of our collective futures.

Key takeaways:

• Why is it important to include critical thinking practices in the designer’s toolkit;
• How nurturing critical foresight and awareness for new possibilities can become empowering;
• To trust in imagination and attention as unlocking latent possibilities;
• To expand your understanding of the wider contexts, ecologies and implications of your work;
• How to develop one’s own practice to support plural responses and make transformative change.

Anab Jain is a filmmaker, designer and futurist. She is the co-founder of Superflux, a pioneering speculative design and experiential futures company in London, UK, working for clients and commissioners such as V&A, Google, Red Cross, UNDP, IKEA, Deepmind and many more. Anab has delivered prolific talks at TED, Skoll, NEXT, House of Lords and House of Commons UK, and shown work at MoMA New York, V&A London, National Museum of China and Museum of the Future Dubai. Profiles on Anab and Superflux can be found in Wall Street Journal, Business Insider and Financial Times.Anab and Jon, co-founders of Superflux have recently been awarded Royal Designers for Industry in speculative design, UK’s highest accolade for design, and Anab also received an honorary doctorate from University of Arts London for her contributions to the field.Anab serves as Professor for Design Investigations at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna since the last six years. Her hope is to instil a culture of radical enquiry in her students, so they can become active designers-translators-catalysts for a complex and uncertain world.Anab’s work can be found at www.superflux.in

Speaker: Peter Gall Krogh – Professor at Aarhus University

Duration: March 30, 4:00 PM – 7:00 PM CET

Language of the Course: English

Price:

• For external professionals – euro 95 + VAT – ENROLL NOW
• For Polimi and POLI.design students, alumni or teachers and for students of other universities – euro 50 + VAT – ENROLL NOW

To take part in the Masterclass, you must fill in the online application form and pay the registration fee by March 29, 2023.

A widespread description of design is Herbert Simons: “Anyone who devices course of action to change existing situations into preferred ones is a designer.” Tricky word here is of course “preferred”; who is preferring what and for whom – this quickly becomes and ethical issue. Most will agree that design is connected to ethics. But it is less obvious how it is connected, and how we articulate such connection. Studies have shown that there is a considerable difference between how theories and philosophy see ethics, and how and under what conditions designers practice ethics.

The Masterclass will present and enable participants to reflect upon, declare, and discuss how ethics and design are connected. Secondly, the masterclass will provide insight into ethics not just in a Eurocentric perspective but also include perspectives outside western philosophy and design thinking.

Key takeaways:

• Ethics are never solid, they are negotiated – how does this happen?
• Ethics are connected to culture – some how does it differ? And what does “culture” imply?
• How does ethics sit in a commercial context?
• Are there tools, models and methods to nurture and materialize ethical concerns in design?
• Further studies, in theory and in practice.

Peter Gall Krogh is trained as an architect and product designer. He is professor at the Department of Digital Design and Information Studies at Aarhus University and associated with Politecnico di Milano. Emblematic to the cross-disciplinary character of his work he has held design professorships in institutions based in art, technology and humanities. Additionally, he has been visiting researcher and professor at TU Eindhoven, Hong Kong PolyU, and Jiangnan University. He contributes to service and interaction design both in practice and by theorizing based on co-design techniques, with a particular interest in aesthetics, collective action, and proxemics. In recent years this has been applied in relation to designing for patient experiences in healthcare. His recent book, Drifting by Intention: Four Epistemic Traditions from within Constructive Design Research, describes what design looks like and how it can be approached when developing knowledge is as equally important as providing opportunities by design.

Speaker: Giulio Quaggiotto – Former Head of UNDP’s Strategic Innovation Unit

Duration: April 14, 4:00 PM – 7:00 PM CET

Language of the Course: English

Price:

• For external professionals – euro 95 + VAT – ENROLL NOW
• For Polimi and POLI.design students, alumni or teachers and for students of other universities – euro 50 + VAT – ENROLL NOW

To take part in the Masterclass, you must fill in the online application form and pay the registration fee by April 13, 2023.

As Madeleine Albright famously quipped, we are facing 21st challenges with 19th century institutions. Much of our institutional infrastructure was designed for an era of predictability and relative stability. The multiple crises we are facing today (inequality, climate, health) and their compound effects, however, don’t lend themselves to linear planning and the quantification of risk based on past behaviour. Rather, radical uncertainty and permanent crisis is the “new normal” we are increasingly likely to face. How do we equip our institutions to face this new reality? What does organisational design for uncertainty (rather than risk) look like? How do we prevent a sense of loss of agency for decision makers and citizens alike? Drawing from emerging practice from across the world, this masterclass will focus on the urgent task of reimagining our institutions so that they can constantly generate new options for action and be better equipped to face the polycrisis.

Key takeaways:

• Why it is important to distinguish between risk and uncertainty;
• How organisational design and culture needs to change to face uncertainty and an era of multiple crises;
• How can we build organisational will for “irreversible” transformation;
• What can we learn from emerging practice in the development and public sector globally.

Giulio Quaggiotto is the former Head of UNDP’s Strategic Innovation unit, working with governments across the world to accelerate impact on complex development challenges. Prior to joining UNDP, he was the Director of Community at Climate KIC and an Innovation Advisor for the Prime Minister’s Office in the UAE. Giulio’s career includes stints at Nesta, WWF and the World Bank. He was also the manager of the Jakarta Lab of the UN Global Pulse, a flagship innovation initiative of the United Nations Secretary-General on big data for public policy. Giulio’s most recent work has focused on portfolio approaches to system transformation. He is an MIT Research Associate with a focus on lead user innovation and a Research Fellow with UCL   Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose.