Patio Design and Crafts: Building Encounters

How can explorations of the histories and practices of craft challenge the conversation around the future of design?

This workshop is a prototype of an inclusion practice between different ways of seeing and making, and an exploration of how to do future visioning across disciplines. We propose broadening the boundary of design institutions to center collaborations with educators and makers from a diverse array of backgrounds and traditions of making. Drawing from decolonial literature, we attempted a practice of Ahmed Ansari’s (2018) proposition to “... reach back to both historical understandings of past being and their changed nature in the present to recover essential ontological features that would point to a new futural state.” As the design collective Patio International, we approached artisans to explore the place- based history and personal meaning within their practices, the present states and challenges, as well as the importance of creative making for the future. We transformed these conversations into audio walks, which participants listened to before joining us to discuss how these perspectives could offer a new perspective or vision for the future of making during a workshop.