Learning to live with others through design. Communities of practices and minor knowledge

Abstract

Questioning the ways in which we have understood architectural practice up until today, reconsidering this, is not a just a challenge for professional practices and the materialization of "other works". It is also the responsibility of the educational sphere, in the sense of broadening the way we teach and learn about architecture. Through a recent teaching experience, focused on some "communities of practice", located in the hills of Valparaíso, it is proposed in this article, to imagine a more relational, affective and inclusive future for the area, that perhaps is less "humanistic" and more human or even "much more than human". The wording of the workshop, The good arts of living "with" others "through" design, alluded to design as a set of practices that fundamentally affect our ways of being together, capable of articulating alternative and certainly local ways of living. The aim of the workshop was to make room in the debates on architecture, for those subjects not represented by the most common methodologies and knowledge inherited from Modernity. Faced with them, the course called for a more inclusive and relational type of "minor knowledge", capable of better interpreting the eco-dependent and interdependent condition that characterizes our radical being in the world. Therefore, it sought to problematize the present of architecture from a committed approach of design to these "communities of practice" and their "minor knowledges". Not because they are necessarily better, but because they include a greater quantity and diversity of forms of life.