Going through nowadays context of today's society's wicked problems wasn’t the most pleasant talk to hear but definitely a very necessary one. It felt like there is not much that we can do to stop the climate emergency we, as humanity, are facing. There are so many ones to blame for this situation and often this era is called anthropogenic. This means that humans as affected so much the earth with our activities that have completely changed the geology. I don’t quite agree with this term so much. I think that the Anthropocene put us, Humans, at the centre of the ecological crisis we are facing. To what I think the biggest and only cause of this is capitalism, and even if we want to get more specific about it, colonialism. So for me, the era we are living in should be called capitalocene.
We know that we have reached the biggest amount of co2 in the atmosphere to date. This has been monitored for a long time thanks to the observatory at Mauna Lua Observatory comparing it to the air bubbles extracted from ice sheets told us the amount of co2 concentrations on the air from the past. The Ice sheets are melting which is a very worrisome situation, not only because of how the sea leaves would rise but because it's our biggest shield to protect ourselves from the sun's rays. The ice sheets are reflecting the sun’s rays and are responsible for keeping us in a stable climate. As for everything in this capitalistic world, the ice sheets are being monetized. I’m not saying that you can buy a piece of ice. But of course, there would be opportunistic people to find ways to make money out of this. Meaning the new shipping routes that might be opened connecting Russia directly to Australia, South America, … during these ice-free summers.
So in this catastrophic vision of the world, we need to ask ourselves, as designers for emergent futures, what is design for more than humans? I personally ask myself, how can I design with nature? Co-creating new paradigms. I want to find ways in which our lifestyle is reducing the amount of co2 and not duplicating it. If we are aiming to be designers for the futures we need to build a critical opinion towards whats the actual worldwide situation and what kind of agents of the change we want to be.
What is a job? Live for working or working to live?
I personally found it very interesting when we talked about future jobs and how automatization would change today's jobs frame. Robots and AI are being developed in gigantic steps that are beyond the development of society. I think that automation of any task can be a positive thing and could make the way we live and understand work different in a near future. I want to believe that we are going towards a less exploded, occupationally talking, society. Where machines would be actually used to make our lives easier and work less. This would lead us to new ways of organizing society. Would it make a more unequal society? What if there would be only high qualification jobs and not standards jobs? What would happen if we would have more free time? I think that maybe people could be more focused on raising families and this could even be a problem of overpopulation with not enough resources for all. But for me, the crucial question is why are we so stacked on a system that only allows us to think about how we would imagine new jobs and not how we could develop a post-capitalistic paradigm where jobs are no longer something that defines us. And we could find motivations for learning and cultivating our minds just because of curiosity. In a new paradigm where knowledge is something that we acquire and share among us and we learn to live in peace together with nature. It might sound too illusionistic but I want to believe that there would be an escape from this system even though it is easier to imagine the end of the world rather than the end of capitalism.
Nation-State
During the last class, we talked about the nation of state. Each of us had to reply to the questions: Where were you born? Where were your parents born? How many passports do you have? Where would you say you are from? What are the problems of the society you were raised in? In this multicultural class where many of us are not from Barcelona, was really interesting to know all the origins of each of us. And it was helpful to understand how is the global context that we are moving in right now. I personally want to reflect on how my sense of belonging has changed a lot since I’m living in Barcelona. As I explained in class I was born in Sevilla and sometimes I have found myself sounding super-patriotic about Spain (which I’m certainly not) just because some Catalan people would like to make the distinction between our cultures to which I don’t fully agree. Every region of Spain is very different culturally talking but that it’s what makes this country richer and interesting from my point of view. Sometimes I feel like people spend way too much time looking at what makes us different instead of appreciating all the things we have in common. So when I’ve been asked where I’m from in Barcelona I would say Sevilla, sometimes wondering if my answer would get any weird faces or responses. I do feel like an immigrant in my own country while when I was living in Madrid I didn’t have that feeling. I also want to highlight that The Ukrainian Bellic conflict has changed my mind a lot when identifying myself as a European, because Europe has been disappointing me a lot… And I feel like being European is such a privilege that I acknowledge but at the same time makes me super frustrated. As I mentioned before colonialism is still very rooted and Europe still acts with superiority towards other countries, which I don’t like at all. Borders exist that’s a reality, but… I don’t know, I don’t like the way is managed. And I wish all kinds of refugees were treated as they should be, Refugees! No matter the country you’re coming from or the way you look.