Lara García Díaz, research lecturer on the Bachelor of Design and coordinator of Eina Research, will give the talk ‘Diseño especulativo más allá de lo humano. Odradek y la extrañeza de las cosas’ (Speculative design beyond the human. Odradek and the strangeness of things), in the framework of the congress dedicated to Franz Kafka that will take place at the Faculty of Philosophy and Educational Sciences of the University of Valencia, on 1 April, from 16:00 to 17:15 in the Aula FCE-1.
The lecture shows the experience and results of a pedagogical methodology that Dr. Lara García Díaz carried out with design students to bring them closer to the transformative possibility of speculative design in the conception and projection of a livable future.
To this end, and through the ideation of a speculative design object, the aim was to invite them to inhabit the strangeness of the things that surround us; that is, to project for and from the strange, by means of an other design. As a starting point, the semiotic relationship of Odradek, Kafka's strange creature in The Concerns of a Family Man, with his narrator was taken as a starting point, insofar as it allows us to draw a simile with our relationship with the Anthropocene and, with this, to develop a more ecological sensitivity on the part of the pupils to all forms of entities.
The aim, therefore, was to open a way, and in particular in this case through the practice of design, through which to reflect on the possibilities of a future in which, like the narrator in The Concerns of a Family Man, we surrender our sovereign functions to an abstract reality. What would be the consequences of such a transfer of sovereignty in the sphere and practice that designs and materialises our world to come?
