MUO-E0022 - Design Culture Now, Lecture, 24.4.2023-5.6.2023

Topic outline

• Teaching Team
  
  

  
  

  Paola Cabrera is a designer committed to a kind of political strategic design that makes for genuine meaningful sustainable participation and learning. She develops ways of embedding these values in her projects and in her teaching, whether for design students or with non-designers such as artisans. In Colombia she completed a degree in design, investigating the history of objects in Bogotá, 1900–1930, and a degree in Cultural management, looking into how a museum of Colombia’s living indigenous cultures could look like. Paola is based since 2001 in Helsinki. In Aalto University she teaches about design and culture and in her doctoral study she looks to examine designers’ perspectives on the cultural dimension of sustainability, and design deployments that indicate positive impact due to being sustainable culturally. In the same University she completed a Master of Arts degree, reflecting on ways in which design can contribute to competitive artisan communities and sustainable local cultures.

  paola.cabrera@aalto.fi
  +358415368640
  

  
  

  
  

  Emīlija Veselova is a doctoral researcher at the NODUS Sustainable Design Research Group, Aalto University. She holds an MA degree in Collaborative Design and BA in Media. Her doctoral research critically investigated the proposition that including natural nonhuman stakeholders in participatory and co-design processes could contribute to sustainability. She also developed approaches for identifying natural stakeholders, including them in design processes and identifying their needs. Emilija researches in the transdisciplinary space of design, sustainability, human-nature systems, and worldviews that underlie sustainability - such as anthropocentrism, human disconnect from nature, and human perceived right to dominate nature - and their alternatives. Currently, she is particularly interested in how the human inner worlds, which include emotions, worldviews, thought patterns, subconscious beliefs, and culture, shape the systems and practical solutions that designers create and stakeholders desire. 

  emilija.veselova@aalto.fi
  

  
  

  
  

  Markéta Dolejsova is a design researcher and curator experimenting with feral, embodied, relational ways of knowing and doing, often in multispecies settings. She currently serves as a postdoctoral research fellow at Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, working with the CreaTures project where she leads the Laboratory of experimental artistic productions. She has co-founded several art-design research initiatives including the Uroboros festival, the Open Forest Collective, the Feeding Food Futures network and the Fermentation GutHub.

  marketa.dolejsova@aalto.fi
  

  
  

  
  

  Michel Nader Sayún is a designer and researcher, MA from Aalto University and Lic. From Tec de Monterrey, interested in how societies interact with and are affected by design. He has experience in social impact research and design projects around change in social systems and inclusivity in the design process. He has worked as a researcher in Aalto University since 2022. Before this, he worked in Forum Virium Helsinki setting up the FinEst Centre for Smart Cities and doing social impact evaluation of smart urban projects. His past experience relates to documentary filming and photography.

  michel.nader@aalto.fi
  

  
  

  
  

  
  

  Nathaly Pinto is a doctoral researcher at Aalto University in Finland and an adjunct professor at Pontificia Universidad Católica in Ecuador. Her research and practice are situated at the intersection of participatory design from the Global South, intercultural communication, and design for social change. Over the past decade, she has collaborated with civil society organizations, working with marginalized communities in Andean South America, and currently conducts research with indigenous organizations and youth in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Together they design visual devices and sustain processes to support diverse indigenous struggles within the framework of Indigenous Community Communication.

  nathaly.pinto@aalto.fi
  

  
  

  
  

  Talvikki Kollmann is a doctoral researcher in the Department of Design. She holds a BA and MA in Design and has gained work experience as a service designer. She is interested in organizational research and sustainable work culture. Her doctoral research explores post-pandemic remote and hybrid work practices in Finnish organizations and aims to re-imagine future work practices that are sustainable and desirable.

  talvikki.kollmann@aalto.fi
  

  
  

  
  

  Guy Julier* is Professor of Design Leadership and Head of Research in the Department of Design at Aalto University. In 2019 he was Commissioner of ‘Everyday Experiments’, the Finnish Pavilion for the XXII Triennale di Milano. His most recent book, Economies of Design (2017), provides an analysis of the multiple roles of design in the contexts of contemporary, neoliberal orthodoxies and beyond. Other books include The Culture of Design (3rd revised edition 2014), the Thames & Hudson Dictionary of Design since 1900 (3rd revised edition 2005) and New Spanish Design (1991).

  
  

  Guy Julier is also a co-editor of Design and Creativity: Policy, Management and Practice (2009) and Design Culture: Objects and Approaches (2019). Before moving to Finland in 2018, he was the Victoria and Albert Museum/University of Brighton Principal Research Fellow in Contemporary Design. After graduating from the Royal College of Art, he worked as a design consultant in London. He later set up DesignLeeds, a research and consultancy unit at Leeds Metropolitan University, specialising in urban change.

  
  * Prof. Guy Julier is on Research Leave from January to June 2023.
  

  
  

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  Teaching Team & Guest Speakers in the Course Handbook