Rethinking Performance and Space: Generosity in a Seven-Factor Methodology to Design Alternative Worlds

Περίληψη

As architects and designers of the environments we live in and considering that we live in a world increasingly full of different crises, climate change and social needs, it is urgent that those shaping common spaces consider new methodologies to stimulate design processes with new perspectives on integration and awareness. This challenge to performance designers and architects leads to ambitious intersections with other fields of knowledge to promote stronger research and more expansive speculation.

Performance designers can benefit from this methodology because it proposes new forms of engagement with others and the environment within the process of design itself. The efficient project equation and methodology proposed here develops an analytical approach that is incremental and more comprehensive than the traditional forms of design. The issues addressed underscore the pressing need to re-evaluate design processes and their outcomes around efficiency and efficacy, particularly in our current time of crisis and rapid technological advancements. Seven factors inform the thinking process proposed by this methodology. In this study, the arguments focus on one: generosity.

This paper expands on a methodology already developed in previous iterations, offering a design process that employs performance and performance design concerns to devise efficient projects. The methodology proposes different initiation points to the design thinking process and can propel different types of collaboration. As argued here, if performance refers, on one hand, to the design of a certain efficiency, it refers on the other hand to the construction of cultural and social meanings that activate social interactions. This second dimension can lead to designing aspects of experience, participation and social cohesion in ways that help us think about alternative worlds, different from the ones that we have designed and that already exist. This world might be collapsing as scientific research attests.