Juliana Restrepo: Let’s Share Everyday Stories of Buen Vivir at Home! Co-Designing Seeds for Relational and Sustainable Homemaking

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Juliana Restrepo, PhD candidate in Interaction Design, K3.

The title of the seminar is Let’s Share Everyday Stories of Buen Vivir at Home! Co-Designing Seeds for Relational and Sustainable Homemaking. It will be Juliana’s 25 percent PhD seminar. Åsa Ståhl, Senior Lecturer in Design, Linnaeus University, will function as discussant.

This will be an online seminar, carried out through Zoom, and it will take place on Wednesday, March 10 at 10.15-12.00. Please join here: https://mau-se.zoom.us/j/68083826429.

Below is an abstract for the seminar. If you would like to read Juliana’s manuscript, please contact her at juliana.restrepo-giraldo@mau.se.

How can Stories of Everyday Life at Home be Unpacked and Re-contextualized as Opportunities to Imagine and Prototype Seeds for Sustainable Transitions and Transformations at Home?

Buen Vivir means living in harmony with all beings and nature through relationality and reciprocity. It is a philosophy rooted in the cosmovision (worldview) of indigenous communities in the Andean territory in South America, which understand humans as never owners of the earth and its resources, only stewards. In this research, I use Buen Vivir at Home to think about sustainable living at home through climate change. By looking at other worldviews and situated home stories, I bring forward the importance of challenging the current conversations about sustainability and sustainable living at home. To move beyond ‘sustainable’ guidelines and checklists and start identifying potential in ourselves, our homes, communities, ‘old’ and emergent practices within ‘our’ unique living environments. I use a programmatic design research approach where various design experiments are conducted to shape the programme and decide the steps forward. Data to grasp insights about different meanings of home and positions towards sustainable living has been collected using Participatory Design Methods such as survey, workshop, in-depth interviews and home-visits, in combination with Metadesign Tools, such as ‘Designing Miracles’ and ‘Languaging’. Collected data have been processed in quantitative and qualitative ways, leading to the emergence of companion concepts. I propose Buen Vivir at Home as a relational framework which intends to develop alternative understandings of sustainable living at home. A set of every day/fiction stories and recipes that can be unpacked, recontextualized and prototyped as design seeds for sustainable/relational transitions and transformations at home.

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