Design Before Design: Learning to be Affected by Neurodiverse Spatial Practices

Abstract

Current ethical and political revivals of design pedagogy foreground the participation of neglected subjects in attempts to democratize design practice. This article explores what participatory design practitioners in architecture might be required to learn when reconfiguring their tasks in the wake of Science and Technology Studies (STS) approaches to Participatory Things: treating them as a more-than-human assembly and unfolding process. This requires designers and architects to engage in designing the “pre-conditions” of participatory practice, “learning to be affected” by variegated actors and their peculiar ways of dwelling. In describing our attempts at approximating ourselves to the spatial practices of a neurodivergent person, we suggest this requires taking into account more-than-verbal experiences that liberal understandings of participation tend to exclude. This approach is here discussed as “design before design”: a form of design practice learning from the alternative approaches to design practice that unfolding “things” might bring to the fore and invite to explore.

Keywords:

• architectural design pedagogy
• participation
• Science and Technology Studies
• more-than-human design
• neurodiversity
• more-than-verbal worlds

Acknowledgments

The authors would especially like to thank Moritz, Susanne, and Julian for their openness to share their experiences during that time in Berlin and beyond. All three gave their explicit consent to the research and the use of their names (the latter is a request we made of them considering – and in line with – a common attitude in the field of disability activism, which rejects anonymity as part of the history of invisibilization of the collective). They also reviewed the doctoral thesis work (Rispoli 2021b) in which an extended version of this experience is described.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This revival prolongs earlier traditions and reflections, in tune with the radical experiments that emerged globally in the late twentieth century, which, according to Beatriz Colomina and her collaborators (2022), sought to disrupt the disciplinary foundations of architecture, challenging modernist and colonial norms and forms of knowledge-production, reimagining the roles for architects as well as their practice.

2 These architects from Alicante engage explicitly with the question of how posthuman thought would transform their practice, especially addressing this in the pedagogic moment of the BA thesis. However, posthuman tenets have received stark criticism in disability rights advocacy and studies, and in particular from Black Feminist and Disability scholars, because the attempt to go beyond the human cannot happen at the expense of leaving those who are rarely counted as human in the first place. Rather, this foregrounds the need to dispute what counts as human (Williams 2021; Benjamin 2019; Erevelles 2011). In our particular context, we’ve found philosopher Erin Manning’s (2020) musings on the emancipatory synergies between neurodiversity and Black thought to be of great relevance for a renewed pedagogy of architecture, particularly because they bring to the fore “more-than-verbal” ways of being in the world.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Micol Rispoli

Micol Rispoli is an architect and Ph.D. in Philosophical Sciences. Working at the crossroads of architecture and STS, she investigates the impact that the material-semiotic lines of insight of actor-network theory, feminist technoscience, and approaches to technical democracy can have for the transformation of design practice and its pedagogy. She currently works as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Environment, Land and Infrastructure Engineering (DIATI) of the Polytechnic University of Turin on a project combining STS perspectives and multispecies ethnography in an attempt to explore possible avenues for more-than-human design. From 2022 to 2023, she taught at BAU College of Arts and Design of Barcelona. Between 2019 and 2020, she spent a research period at the Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology, a research platform at the Institute for European Ethnology of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. [email protected]

Tomás Criado

Tomás Criado is an urban anthropologist with specialization in STS. He currently works as Ramón y Cajal Senior Research Fellow at the Open University of Catalonia’s CareNet-IN3 group. His ethnographic and public engagement work focuses on different instances of knowledge and material politics in settings where care is invoked as a mode of urban intervention; be it as a particular mode of technoscientific activism (democratizing knowledges, design practice, and infrastructures) or as a practice of articulating ecologies of support (accessible urbanism, urban heat care plans). www.tscriado.org | @tscriado [email protected]