Situated Design Practices: Learning Design through Context, Community, and Collaboration
Situated Design Practices course emphasizes learning by doing, connecting theory with lived experience, and exploring how communities.
The Situated Design Practices course, part of the Master in Design for Emergent Futures (MDEF), offers students a unique opportunity to engage deeply with the environments, communities, and social dynamics that shape contemporary design. Led by Saul Baeza, the course emphasizes learning by doing, connecting theory with lived experience, and exploring how communities, visible or hidden, institutionalized or marginal, celebrated or stigmatized, emerge and transform.
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Designing from Context and Community
The course unfolds through four episodes, each highlighting different “situated design practices” and two complementary lenses: one grounded in geographical context, the other in community engagement. While these lenses can be explored separately, they often intersect in unexpected and meaningful ways, revealing how place, people, and practice shape each other.
Students engage directly with communities and organizations ranging from experimental collectives to research institutions, as well as interdisciplinary experts (artists, lawyers, journalists, and niche internet personalities) who provide insight into social, political, and cultural dynamics.
Week in Practice: Experiences and Encounters
- Day 1 – Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC)
The course begins with a visit to Spain’s national supercomputing center, exploring high-performance computing installations like MareNostrum. Here, students meet Carmen Robres, MDEF alumna and researcher, to understand how advanced technologies intersect with social and spatial contexts. - Day 2 – Cal Negre
Students travel by bike to this experimental community near Barcelona Airport. Residents explore communal ways of living and working, deeply connected to their territory. Hands-on workshops and immersive activities allow students to experience how collaborative practices emerge from everyday life. - Day 3 – Online Lecture with Ozzline Mercedes
Interdisciplinary artist Ozzline Mercedes explores erotic labor, digital culture, and power structures through performance and text. Students critically engage with readings in advance, connecting personal experience, desire, and theory to design practice. - Day 4 – Online Lecture with Hibai Arbide
Lawyer and journalist Hibai Arbide shares his research on borders, forced communities, and gentrification. Students prepare by viewing his documentary Exarchia: Resisting Gentrification, reflecting on displacement, migration, and social justice in urban contexts.
These episodes combine fieldwork, reflection, and dialogue with practitioners to cultivate a situated understanding of design that is relational, ethical, and responsive to the needs of communities.
Methodology: Learning by Doing, Reflecting, and Engaging
The course integrates multiple pedagogical strategies:
- Case studies and urban exploration to observe how context shapes practice.
- Hands-on workshops to experience design as a material and social process.
- Lectures and discussions with external experts to broaden perspectives on labor, power, borders, and culture.
- Collaborative reflection to connect findings with design practice, emphasizing both critical thinking and ethical positioning.
Impact: Developing Designers for Complex Futures
Situated Design Practices is more than a course—it is an immersive laboratory for critical, ethical, and responsive design. Students not only acquire technical skills but also develop the ability to perceive and act within complex social and spatial systems, designing with communities rather than for them.
By bridging theory, fieldwork, and interdisciplinary dialogue, the course embodies the MDEF philosophy: preparing designers capable of navigating uncertainty, amplifying marginalized voices, and fostering meaningful, situated interventions.