Designing is entangling — arranging potentials for interplays, interdependencies, chain reactions, or platforms for inflecting populations of objects. It shouldn’t always work and it is indeterminate in order to be practical — to adjust to changing conditions or to moments when it is politically out-maneuvered.

These protocols might even put the development machine into reverse to return agency to multiple authors of community.

Without colluding can they short circuit or unwind abusive markets? How can these landscapes filled with multipliers and switches be carriers of an amplifying germ of their own reverse engineering? Can they address a community scale as well as a planetary scale?

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Keller Easterling is a designer, writer and professor at Yale. Her books include Medium Design (Verso 2021), Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014), Subtraction (Sternberg, 2014), Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades (MIT, 2005) and Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America (MIT, 1999).

“BEYOND SCALE” LECTURE SERIES:

Although the spatial dimension is crucial in architecture and design,  especially in relation to humans, our concerns extend into other major concerns. (Especially now when so many people like to see “scalability” as the panacea for all). The series aims at linking current challenges and questions within and beyond architecture and design, from the macroscale of infrastructural and territorial dynamics to the microscale of the pixel component. We aim to set up conversations around topics that pertain to architecture and design, but that also have a considerable impact beyond our discipline, such as:

• Energy consumption and environmental impact of the built environment, at all scales.
• Transformation and reutilization versus production from scratch (of objects, buildings, fashion, software, etc)
• Inclusivity, diversity, parity, and questions of care in the professional and academic environment
• Global practices versus local awareness of specific contexts
• The digital realm as a space for creation, action, protest, vindication, etc

Lectures will take place in hybrid format from our Segovia and Madrid campuses at 18pm CET