COURSE
CHANGING SOCIETIES
University of Basel, Urban Studies, MA Critical Urbanisms, Spring 2023
CO-DESIGN COMMUNITIES
DESIGNING MOBILITY ACROSS DISCIPLINES
TRANSFORMATIVE DISCIPLINARITY
Mobility enables us to explore the world and serves as one of the most essential foundations of social development. Within an intersectional framework, sustainability should be its core goal. Social sciences play a crucial role in achieving sustainability, yet the challenge lies in bridging the gaps and resolving conflicts with design disciplines.
The Co-Design Community is a project developed at the intersection of social sciences and leading design disciplines to reimagine how they can address the challenges of future mobility.
The Co-Design Community offers creative, transdisciplinary tools for social scientists and designers, empowering communities to envision their future of mobility.
TRANSDISCIPLINARITY IS ESSENTIAL FOR SUSTAINABLE MOBILITY
The current approach taken by design disciplines to shape our future based solely on their own parameters is neither effective nor sustainable. These practices often foster greater dependency among communities while neglecting the critical importance of sustainability. What is needed is an integrated design approach that actively collaborates with the social sciences, creating a feedback loop that returns community knowledge to its people.
Encouraging the social sciences to share their insights and experiments with design disciplines—such as architecture, urban planning, and transportation—can address the challenges facing future cities. Sensitivity to designing a sustainable future requires design disciplines to understand societal dynamics, ranging from individual behaviors to collective public interactions.
The challenges of sustainable mobility underscore the pressures of an interconnected world, community, and environment. In response, designers and researchers must come together, embracing transdisciplinary collaboration to seek a more sustainable and inclusive path forward.
CITY AS A FUNCTION OF MOVEMENT
The project seeks to address global challenges by integrating social sciences more effectively into urban environments. It examines the role of designers in shaping sustainable mobility, aiming to understand how the insights and preconceptions of the social sciences can be incorporated into the planning of future cities, services, and infrastructures.
Design holds a pivotal role in redefining mobility. While the social sciences can explore and analyze future challenges, they often fall short of providing practical solutions. Through co-design and collaboration with other disciplines, these objectives can be translated into human-centric realities. This approach helps to better understand the current design landscape across architecture, urban planning, and transportation.
THE CHALLENGES OF OUR CITIES ARE INTER-SECTIONAL
Cities face multifaceted challenges related to mobility, prompting designers to explore innovative visions and creative solutions to unlock their potential.
The Co-Design Community project fosters collaboration among designers, bringing them together under a shared vision to make collective decisions. This approach helps us gain joint insights into the future of cities and provides tools to address a range of issues impacting mobile societies, including environmental restoration.
Effective solutions can only emerge by reintegrating the social sciences with design disciplines.
TRANSFORMATIVE RESEARCH METHODS
The project will bring together designers from various design disciplines and researchers from the social sciences, drawing on a transdisciplinary perspective within these networks.
It will review publications, conduct email interviews with designers from architecture, urbanism, transportation, and science focus groups, carry out academic surveys, hold meetings with public organizations, and organize workshops and co-design activities with design students to gather project details.
*Design—encompassing experience, architectural, urban, and transportation design—will serve as a means of embodying the social sciences rather than simply providing solutions.
HUMAN-CENTRED MOBILITY
This work helps us understand the role of design in urban environments and how social studies contribute to shaping the future of mobility.
It allows us to explore potential paths for how mobility infrastructure might adapt to provide access for everyone while promoting social, environmental, and economic justice.
We can also further explore the research opportunities that emerge from this work, grounded in human-centered design.
The research outputs gather insights through the lens of the social sciences, where collaborations between design and social disciplines identify new skill sets for sustainable future mobility.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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