Research Incubator: Design Friction

Description:

The Design Friction research team is a study, experimentation, and critical reflection hub around visual communication expressions and contemporary approaches to graphics as topic, discipline, and practice. We propose an environment to amplify and diversify inquiries on visual iteracy, experimental typography, editorial design, publishing as creative practice, illustration, and visual imagery as artifacts of design observation and analysis.

This research team proposes a decolonial, feminist, and inclusive approach to design, allowing the participants to read visual issues and create disruptive projects where history, theory, and commercial practices are constantly challenged. We involved speculative, critical, future-building, and fiction as methods to visually iterate on social conflicts, gender issues, poetics, activism, and storytelling.

The Design Friction research team applies a lab attitude, or a playground metaphor, to convey individual and collective explorations. We propose a diverse range of activities: technical challenges, critical reading of projects, conversations, creative writing, and image making. Each semester we will iterate around a topic or central brief while we experiment on smaller individual or collective projects about specific interests and participant questions.

General Objective:

To foster a space for study, experimentation, and critical reflection on speculative, critical, and fiction design, promoting the development of research-creation projects that challenge historical canons, established commercial dynamics, and disciplinary conventions through a decolonial, feminist, and inclusive perspective .

Specific Objectives:

1. 1. To explore and apply speculative, critical, and collaborative methodologies that enable participants to develop research-creation projects addressing social conflicts, gender issues, personal poetics, activism, and disruptive.
2. 2. To promote an interdisciplinary and transgressive learning environment where design, architecture, and the arts are articulated from a non-instrumentalist approach, incorporating expanded editorial thinking and queer theory as creative tools.
3. 3. To facilitate dialogue and critical exchange through the review of references, creative writing, image production, and the development of individual and collective projects, consolidating a reflective practice on design and its political and cultural implications.

Lines of Research or Active Projects:

1. 1. Speculative, critical, and fictional design
2. 2. Queer theory, decoloniality, and activism in design
3. 3. Expanded editorial thinking and transdisciplinary experimentation