For over eight years, I have been developing a design manual to
help students and professionals address complex social challenges and conflicts
within marginalized contexts, with the goal of fostering hope.
The design manual focuses on promoting reflection on objects and the
interaction with them, from a perspective enriched by theory and critical imagination.
It applies these insights to social design, specifically the creation of experiences for the common good. From this approach arises an initial observation of how relationships with objects have been
evolving, adapting to a life that demands new attributes and characteristics from
them, as well as the capacity to generate more complex, interactions as occurs
with more sophisticated ones. This manual includes reflections
from various fields of knowledge, such as critical theory, philosophy, art, literature,
linguistics, and other areas of the humanities and social sciences. These
perspectives can offer valuable insights to the design discipline, enabling the creation
of unique and meaningful objects with transformative, symbolic, disruptive,
and instituting powers. The aim is to establish significant foundations for the creation of objects that promote dialectical and emancipatory processes,
rather than those that enslave, control, or alienate people. Today, it is imperative
to denounce, reverse, generate and regenerate new and creative design logics that
encourage significant changes among people.